Repairing the Past, Imagining the Present Otherwise: A Conversation Series

"Repairing the Past, Imagining the Present Otherwise" is a three-part conversation series that brings together an interdisciplinary group of artists and scholars from Greece and the United States. Using the idea of repair as a point of departure, these dialogues trace how oscillatory movements between Athens' multiple pasts and diverse presents can help us envision alternative ways of inhabiting the world together.

Each event will center around the multi-disciplinary practice of a contemporary artist, putting their work in conversation with a scholar of antiquity. The dialogic format aims to break down disciplinary boundaries, blurring the distinctions between artist, academic, and practitioner.

Week by week, as these artists share their work and engage with other points of view, we will together enact the collaborative process of repair, reassembling disparate pieces into configurations unlike preexisting wholes.

Part 1 | Dialogue (Medean Remix)
September 9, 1 PM EST / 8 PM Athens
Registration link:
https://duke.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYode6ppzsiGNapwkF2HpTNGuXapJiIA…
Visual artist Stefania Strouza will discuss with Prof. Brooke Holmes how she uses sculptural forms to emphasize the fluidity and mobility of fragments. Strouza's latest project proposes an aesthetic and cultural inquiry into the current geological epoch through the archetypical myth of Medea.

Part 2 | Performing Gender and Greek Tragedy in the Digital Agora
September 23, 1 PM EST / 8 PM Athens
Registration link:
https://duke.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUvdeCsrjIiGtbI4pYiN-C1ejn4BTRRo…
Performer and director Elli Papakonstantinou will share with Prof. Erika L. Weiberg how she sets tragic figures such as Antigone and Alcestis within our contemporary digital agora to bring alive the tension between the individual and collective voice.

Part 3 | Computing Past, Excavating Future
September 30, 1 PM EST / 8 PM Athens
Registration link:
https://duke.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpc-qvqD4rGteuLXgBtV04oIGU5B5sR…
Sculptor Petros Moris will talk with Prof. Dimitris Plantzos about how he mixes materials associated with the past and cutting-edge technologies of the present, thus juxtaposing stratified manifestations of memory with the pending project of the future.