Killing the father, 2004

Installation in the exhibition ‘The body in Ancient Drama’, Kronos factory, Eleusina.

The project uses the text of the drama ‘Bacchae’ by Euripides as a springboard for addressing the themes Text/Body/Writing . It consists of an installation of photographs and imprints of body parts on the pages of the book ‘Bacchae’ and a video documenting the action of making the imprints.

Pentheas

The text as the eternal, unchanging, preexisting Word. The Word as the Father. The duty of the body is to serve the Word of the Father. Reason, order, consistency, measurement. The body as servant of the word, of representation. Each of its gestures has to re-present. To stand for something within the ruling system of the Text. Thus, bodies become the pages on which the Text is written.

Agave

The mother of the body, Mother Earth, overturns the ruling of the Word-the Father. It transforms the eternal, and thus preexisting text to a site for the body’s autonomous action. Its writing. The body is transitory, leaving just the traces of its act, that do not mean anything but themselves. It shatters the unity of the Text, transforming it into a transitory, fragmentary ‘event’. Like two sides of the same coin, they mirror each other’s dismemberment. The body, by separating itself from the Word through its active writing, kills the Father in violence and celebration. The orgiastic dismemberment of Pentheas by his mother, Agave. A possible theater in which the action of the body gains autonomy creating anti-texts over the eternal cultural Texts.