Anna Goula is a pop idol created and impersonated by the artist Joy Kolaitis. Pioneering in the local turbofolk music scene (skyladiko), Anna Goula is the spawn of democratic integralism, mass cultural participation, and economic optimism in Greek society since the 1980s. The acoustic image of her alias translates to nausea. Trashy love affairs, the acropolis, show biz magazine aesthetics, recent kitsch in architecture and design, and Anna’s presence protagonize in this well-orchestrated mimicry of the horizontal appeal and re-invention of “tradition” in late 20th-century Greek society. By deepening trash aesthetics to render them indulging, Anna Goula’s music videos, interviews, and public performances pursue a feminist reworking of social normality. By overflowing the local/patriarchal vision with an unbearable pastiche of its own idols, Anna Goula glitches Greek societal structures such as the family, the community, and the ethos of newly rich strata, jeopardized by the financial crisis.

#alterego #greeksociety #pastiche #trash #kitsch #feminism #sexuality

photos: Nysos Vasilopoulos, 6th Athens Biennale 2018 ANTI