Wrightwood 659 & Comfort Station Present
Codes of Radical Persistence
July 24th | Sundown
On Saturday, July 24, please joins us at Comfort Station in Logan Square for Codes of Radical Persistence, a film series inspired by the life and work of Greek painter, Yannis Tsarouchis.
Jointly hosted by Wrightwood 659 and the Comfort Station, Codes of Radical Persistence aims to bring awareness to the evolving lexicon of queer persistence within Greece from the post-war era to the present day. The screening features the documentary Kaliarda (2015) by actress and director Paola Revenioti on Kaliarda, a secret language of the homosexual community in Greece from the end of World War II through the regime change in the 70s. The program also includes archival footage and premieres a new virtual performance, Affect Alien, by Athens-based artist Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou Bunny which intertwines the experience of the famous activist and rebetiko singer Sotiria Bellou with her close friend Yannis Tsarouchis. The films in this program will be on view virtually at wrightwood659.org/programs/ for the week following the July 24th premiere.
Kaliarda, directed by Paola Revenioti and the filmmaking team Paola Team Documentaries, traces the secret language of the homosexual community in Greece, from the 40s until the country’s regime change in the early 70s. Paola became acquainted with Kaliarnta towards the end of its use, in the 80s. The team started out aiming to record the history of Kaliarda, but realized they were recording the history of the homosexual community life in Greece during the 20th century. Themes start emerging, such as love, sexuality, hang-outs, the problems faced by homosexuals at the time and how conditions gradually changed until today. In the documentary, we speak with academics and people from the street, who had a first-hand experience of our subject.
Affect Alien is a video-performance inspired by Yannis Tsarouchi’s and Sotiria Bellou’s artistic expression, radical life and friendship in the early twentieth century, in a dialogue with the experience of being a queer person living in Greece in 2021.
Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou (Bunny) brings into life, and through their own artistic language, the subversive butterfly figures of Tsarouchi’s paintings combined with a poetic transformation of the lyrics of Sotiria Bellou’s rebetiko songs.
As a result, a video portrait-painting of a creature that aspires to transcend binaries and heteronormative figurations of gender and subjectivity, exploring transformation, hybridity, queer trauma and the importance of the chosen family.
BIOS
Paola Revenioti is a documentarian, publisher, photographer, and trans* sex worker based in Athens, Greece. Paola is a legendary figure in greek LGBTIQ+ movement and has been active since the late 70s. She does not self-identify as an activist. She began publishing KRAXIMO, a magazine of “revolutionary homosexual expression”, in 1981. In the 90s she organized in Athens some of the first Pride events in the country. She was a candidate for the Greek Parliament in July 2019 – also in 1990 – being the first trans candidate ever. In the last decade Paola Revenioti has been active in the field of documentary films, dealing with historical, social, and political topics, often from the so-called margins of society. She has been invited to present her work in festivals, squats, galleries and universities in several countries.
Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou Bunny (b. 1993) lives and works in Athens and Berlin. Their work is based on creating subversive imaginings of subjectivity, sexuality, gender, desire and co-existence. Their multidisciplinary practice is comprised of participatory installations, performances and experimental poetic texts in order to build visionary fictions and show alternative ways of how to see the world.
In 2018 they created Fluffy Library, a one-year hybrid project produced by ATOPOS cvc and supported by NEON, in the context of UNESCO’s Athens 2018-World Book Capital. In 2019, Fluffy Library was presented as a solo show at the Arnolfini Centre of Contemporary Arts in Bristol, UK. Their work has also been showed at the 6th Biennale of Thessaloniki “Imagined Homes”, the 10th Berlin Biennale “We don’t need another hero” in collaboration with Fabiana Faleiros at KW Institute for Contemporary Arts, the “Manifestos for Queer Futures” Festival at HAU Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin, the Alternative Stage of the National Opera of Greece, the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, the Goethe Institut of Athens. Currently they are an artist in residency at the Fresh A.I.R. Program of the Urban Nation Museum in Berlin. Their latest project is a universally accessible film titled DENTATA PEARLS, commissioned and produced by Stegi - Onassis Foundation.