Related Sites: Resistant Collectivities, Healing Epistemologies
Lectureperformance by Joulia Strauss with an Ancent Greek Lyre and Vietnamese Qi Gong.
As a reincarnation of an Ancient Greek singer, Joulia Strauss will offer a sound healing transmission of Pythagorean frequencies which allow us to delve into a form of marginalised non-neocortex-centered knowledge of tuning ourselves. The Ancient Greek hymns will accompany our journey to Athens, where Athenian communities are fighting for the Akadimia Platonos Jungle, a park as a common, protected by surrounding communities through millenia, a park from which the term Akadimia originates. 2.5 thousand years ago, Plato tought there. For ten years, Joulia Strauss organises a free access university and a durational art work in one, directly on this ground: Avtonomi Akadimia, to overwrite Platos' Politeia from an ecofeminist perspective. The struggle for the park is emblematic for the violent privatisation of our living spaces and destruction of humanoids as creative creatures: while tourists are being exposed to 48°C and have to be saved by emergency doctors, the mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyiannis plans an ecocide of main parks of Athens.
Political healing practices and healing of Politics today becomes existential. Healing of our societies involves healing of our self-perception as no longer only as individuals, but as part of the sacred organism which manifests in a community. Public spaces belong to this forgotten entity called “we”. The lectureperformance invites participating witches to unite into a movement which seeks to establish rights for nature.
Transformation of the educational system of Europe involves teachings of self-care which help us to stop extractivist behaviour by starting from ourselves: we will learn powerful practice of Qi Gong and Kung Fu which we will be able to apply daily to support our sanity, awareness and nourish ourselves with high energy.
Joulia Strauss is a cat, artist, activist and multimedia sculptor. She was born in the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Mari El, one of Europe’s last indigenous cultures with a shamanic tradition, and lives and works in Athens and Berlin. Her sculptures, paintings, performances, drawings and video works have been seen in solo and group exhibitions at the Pergamon Museum and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, at Tate Modern, as well as at the Tirana Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Athens Biennale, the Kyiv Biennial, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and documenta14, among others. She is the editor of Krytyka Polityczna Athens and (with Friedrich Kittler, Peter Berz, and Peter Weibel) of Götter und Schriften rund ums Mittelmeer (Wilehlm Fink, 2017). Strauss is the founder and organizer of Avtonomi Akadimia in Athens. She is currently training to earn her fourth stripe in Việt Võ Đạo Kung Fu and finalizing her film Transindigeneous Assembly.