WORKSHOP BY VIGIL

Workshop by VIGIL
in the framework of the project [a] border of dying

Sunday 5 March 2023, 12:00 – 15:00
5 Mpenizelou Palaiologou, ground floor
Free admission

On Sunday March 5, the artistic collective VIGIL will host a workshop open to the public. The participants will collectively explore the techniques and process of discoloration.

About the collaboration:
The building located at Mpenizelou Palaiologou Street, which once housed "DR. DELIS SA", a trading and distribution company for specialty chemical and plastic products, today hosts the new project space of Flux Laboratory Athens. The interior of the building was reactivated, for the first time after four years, with the artistic project "[a] border of dying", a collaboration of the artistic collective VIGIL with Flux Laboratory Athens and the brand IT'S A SHIRT.

Last November VIGIL (Despina Sanida Crezia and Fotini Stamatelopoulou) started working on site as artists-in-residence, taking over the old chemical laboratory on the ground floor and other spaces to conduct their artistic and choreographic research. The project title "[a] border of dying", challenging the boundaries of the words 'dying' and 'dyeing', refers both to the subject and process of the performative piece and the installation, as well as to the original identity of the building itself – a symbol of chemical industry - which is lost.

Flux Laboratory Athens in an attempt to create a linkage with the history of the building, its industrial elements, and the notion of a “family entreprise” - a typical business model of Greek entrepreneurship- invited Christina Christodoulou, founder of IT'S A SHIRT, to create garments that VIGIL used during their textile experimentation.

The performative piece:
“[a] border of dying” is an interdisciplinary collaborative research project that focuses on visual arts through the prism of textile use and discoloration, and though movement within which the human body is approached as a tool, while the concepts of corrosion and change are explored.

VIGIL’S movement research is structured around the notions of skin, time, transformation and corrosion, effort and coexistence. The project investigates the dipole of existence / non-existence and body’s resistance in it, but also the dipole of vigour / passivity that permeates this resistance.

The process of use and discoloration of textiles is approached through the terms of territoriality, border, and the fragmented “death”, but also through a process of effort and patience.