The visitors are asked to make their own greek coffee for the women to read their futur in coffee grains. They are asked to “prepare” themselves by performing rituals such as crawling and smashing dishes. An audio of Vassilo’s story who kills babies and children, a figure stemming both real stories of remote greek villages and greek literature (Alexandros Papadiamadis’ Fonissa).

A project on greek exoticism, on women emancipation and on the contradictions of  the western gaze on the «woman of the east».

Performed at:

Espace Sold_Out, Geneva June 2019

Palais de Rumine, Lausanne, October 2020

FRAGMENTS & ABSENCES festival, Grand Palais, Bern, October 2021

A collaboration with Sophia Kouloukouri, Christina Bisiritsa, Antonia Diakadoni, Pauline Huguet, Alexia Pasteels and Beth Dillon.

Photos of the performance of the 3d of october 2020 by Michel Krafft

The performance at Palais de Rumine was part of the exhibition Exotic? Switzerland, Looking Outward in the Age of Enlightenment. The exhibition is the outcome of aprocess of long research by the art historian Noemie Etienne and her collaborators who problematise what was “exotic” in Switzerland of the 18th century and how Switzerland itself was exoticised by internal and external narratives. How and what was constructed as “swiss as the other” and also “the other of the swiss” puts in question the notion of identity and creates reactions. Who is missing from the dominant narratives? How these contributed to the national narrative of the country? How the naturalisation of social differences enabled the construction and division of and in societies, a subject treated by the gender studies proffesor Patricia Purtschert in the catalogue of the exhibition.

Book edited by Claire Brizon, Noémie Étienne, Chonja Lee and Étienne Wismer