Oral Fixation
Part of the group show On the Tip of the Tongue
@ Enterprise Projects, Athens
On December 18, 2020, Margarita Athanasiou, Helena Papadopoulos, Theofilos Tramboulis, Evita Tsokanta, and Despina Zefkili met at Enterprise Projects, and discussed matters around art publications and magazines in Greece, their position inside the realm of contemporary art, their past, present and future, as well as lan- guage and translation. Five months after that gathering, the audio documentation of the discussion fills Enterprise Project’s environment once again, along with two new art commissions. Kostas Roussakis’s and Marina Miliou-Theocharaki’s works are also conversing – through different channels and from different starting points – with the space itself, negotiating the written and spoken word, its variations and possibilities.
Oral Fixation (2021), Marina Miliou-Theocharaki’s sound installation, approaches voice, speech, and their sensorial traces. With a text she wrote herself, serving as a score, the artist employs different functions of the mouth as a material and a medium to initiate the visitor into a unique bodily stimulation. Inhabiting the spectrum that expands from the mouth’s basic survival functions to the ones that are purely devoted to pleasure, Miliou-Theocharaki’s installation creates a new linguistic condition, one that pertains to the texture, intensity, and mystery of the voice, beyond any language or translation.
On the Tip of the Tongue is a platform fostering the coexistence of different tools, forms, and approaches that relate to the written and spoken word, what comes before it, and its transmutations.
Discussants: Margarita Athanasiou, Helena Papadopoulos, Theofilos Tramboulis, Evita Tsokanta, Despina Zefkili
Artists: Marina Miliou-Theocharaki, Kostas Roussakis
Sound Design: Dimitris Patsaros
Please email to request a link to the Sound Piece.