UMA

Location: Athens, Greece

Description:

The main concept is the de-institutionalization of the notion of classical music. More specific, the decomposition of a quartet through the isolation- disintegration of one of the four main components, is being attempted.
The play that is proposed is one of the most popular ones, namely the quartet No. 8 by the Soviet Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. It expresses with the most direct and drastic way the sentiments of melancholy.
Shostakovich’s music reflects with the most global and direct way the state of society today; violence, hysteric and aggressive sound, fast pace, are elements that are included in the second part of the play and function as means to generate scenes of the despair of innocent victims of war, and moreover of the contemporary Greek crisis. By amplifying the sense of beat and energy, Shostakovich is creating a situation of panic and despair, reflected ti the contemporary psychological situation of the Greek but the European society.
The choice of the locations was aiming at revealing neutral open spaces of the urban fabric of the city of Athens. Open spaces are being presented as “non-spaces”. The non-covered (a-kaliptos) spaces of the building blocks are areas within the city where neither character nor form is defined, yet function as boundaries with randomness in their morphological composition.
In each one of these selected spaces each musical instrument will execute each own particular fragment of the quartet no. 8 on each own; at the same time the whole project is being video and sound recorded. Each moment is being projected in two dimensions. The sense of sound is given through the interval of space and time. Each particular projection acts fragmentally as an individual composition within their own aim of existence, being chosen in unique spaces which acquire a new character due to the events taking place within them.