Theo Prodromidis evokes charismatic poet and writer Galatea Alexiou Kazantzaki (1881-1962), who is considered to be one of the first Greek socialist writers who actively participated in the Greek Communist Party, and who was subsequently prosecuted during the rise of fascism in 1938. Prodromidis’ participative audio work “A poem is an image (Αμαρτωλό)” is based upon Kazantzaki’s poem Αμαρτωλό (Sinful) from 1931. The artist invited a group of local participants fro different activist and cultural backgrounds to perform the poem in and out of sync, in unison and solo, creating a temporal choir with alternating distances. The performance of the poem evoked layers of the current Greek context, such as the deterioration of the healthcare system and rising systemic violence against the HIV positive population, as well as other often vulnerable groups, such as immigrant women, who have been denied basic human rights and brutally criminalised.
I’ll open the door straight, dead straight into the fire traces how individual voices and gestures coalesce in collective movements, mapping some of the possible currents of female emancipatory participation that run depend wide, and which flow into the common stream of current struggles.

WHAT, HOW & FOR WHOM/WHW
curators of
I’ll open the door straight, dead straight into the fire
State of Concept, Athens, Greece
May – September 2019
text for the exhibition catalogue