Program

Esperia Palace > Ground floor > GiGi

The Peng! Collective was founded in 2013 and is composed of a group of activists based in Berlin. They define themselves as an explosive concoction of activism, hacking and art battling the barbarism of our time. At AB6, The Peng! Collective exhibits the Civil Financial Regulation Office, a call center installation operated by six persons trained and hired as agents to call up representatives of financial regulatory and policy bodies in Europe. In this framework, the Peng! talks about their practice, how they explore creative means of protest and challenge mainstream mindsets with subversive direct actions and civil disobedience.

Meeting point: Goethe-Institut Athen 

Guided tour leader: Mary Adamopoulou

Have you ever wondered what is common between the first apartment building in Athens and which building hosted the first radius generator Redken? Do you know the elegant building in the center of Athens the famous Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen referred to and which one considered as an example for the facade of Hadrian's Library?

What is the link between the biggest private building of Athens, the villa in Kifisia named after the first Greek newspaper of New York, and Omonoia Square?

True, "written" on the walls of Athens and its suburbs stories. And yet, unknown to its daily passengers and its visitors, who usually stay in the emblematic attractions the travel guides suggest. Which is the yarn connecting them? Their relation with Germany.

Valueable stories not only for the architects, but also for those who are interested in economy, politics, diplomacy, science or for those who are still fascinated by the great loves. Stories that can turn a walk in Athens into a "dive" in the past using just an application on their mobile phone: the Deutsche Spuren / German Tracks of the Goethe-Institut.

Esperia Palace > Ground floor > GiGi

The Taxi Driver Poetry Workshop has been conceived as an experimental and unpredictable language "class" at GiGi, a space dedicated to Greek-German love and togetherness. Through a guided tour following the flow of "German Traces", the workshop will end up at Esperia Palace for inhabiting the space with poetic moods and performative attitudes. Language teachers, students, administrative staff of the Goethe-Institut, and visual artists, will coexist considering the means of interpreting a poem through an artwork and vice versa. Based on the German-Greek stereotypical constructions occupying the Athenian streets, we will attempt to approach and poeticize our “speech” and that of the taxi drivers of our heart.

Participants: Amalia Charikiopoulou, Marios Chatziprokopiou, Alexis Fidetzis, Eva Giannakopoulou, Matthias Jakus, Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki, Dimitris Soudias, The Flower Girls, Eleftherios Varlamis Stefas, Markella Xilogiannopoulou

Esperia Palace > 1st floor > KINO

Lauren Wy is an artist born and raised in south Los Angeles. Her recent body of work is an exploration of a partially imagined pseudo-narrative netherworld haunted by some unidentified collective trauma. A series of lush scenes bathed in personal secrets. "I am interested in identity and self-presentation as they relate to power relationships, cult and tribal grouping, femme presentation, ritual and the solipsistic need to touch each other", she writes on her website. At AB6, Lauren Wy talks about her artistic practice, the series of drawings she exhibits at TTT building and what motivates her to make art.

Esperia Palace > 1st floor > KINO

Kosta Rapadopoulos puppet, a hilarious, penniless yet disarmingly goodhearted Greek gastarbeiter, has late-night TV show and appears on YouTube clips philosophizing on Greek lifestyle, history, and contemporary politics. Kosta Rapadopoulos is an uncanny overidentification with a typical semi-folk identity representing unresolved intercultural objectifications and fantasies. How is the "Greek identity" reproduced internationally? What is the imprint of the recent crisis in bilateral representations of the other? 

ΤΤΤ Building > 1st floor

How can a movement be political? And what does a body mean in the post-digital age? In their series Movements the performance company The Agency is concerned with the potential of physical and political movements and how they interface. With Medusa Bionic Rise they develop a fitness cult engaged in radical trans-human self-optimisation – in the grey area between self-control and self-empowerment. Inspired by the gaze of Medusa, the artists create the fiction of an underground movement in their immersive site-specific performance for AB6. 

The Agency has been working immersevely with the formats and narratives of neoliberalism since 2015. The Agency affirmatively overwinds these formats. The Agency takes up the strategies of branding, atmosphere and corporate identity aesthetically. The content dealt with revolves around technologies of self and body, post-human affinity and alienation. The Agency is Magdalena Emmerig, Belle Santos, Rahel Spöhrer and Yana Thönnes. They work with a group of sound designers, performers and dancers. The group lives and works in Munich and Berlin.

Artistic Direction: The Agency Magdalena Emmerig, Belle Santos, Rahel Spöhrer, Yana Thönnes with The Agency Nile Koetting, Stacyian Jackson, Jeremy Nedd, Lara Scherrieble, Hrefna Hoern Leifsdottir, Nastja Antonenko
Sound Design: Nile Koetting
Video & Website: Hoern Leifsdottir
Production Management: SISK – Sabine Klötzer

Limited capacity, book your seat now! 

Esperia Palace > Ground floor > GiGi

A-B.international is the first cultural magazine in Greek and German, to mediate between Athens and Berlin.

Within the context of the 6th Athens Biennale ANTI, we want to celebrate the launch of our first issue in Athens. Hosted in GiGi, a project dealing with Greek-German relations as performative method, we would like to invite you to the beautiful venue of the Esperia Palace. So come by and help us shape the Greek-German friendship. Since, how can we get to know each other better, than over a drink?

Music by T0dorakis (Atavism)
Open Bar: 7pm - 8pm
 

Esperia Palace > 1st floor > KINO

Kosta Rapadopoulos puppet, a hilarious, penniless yet disarmingly goodhearted Greek gastarbeiter, has late-night TV show and appears on YouTube clips philosophizing on Greek lifestyle, history, and contemporary politics. Kosta Rapadopoulos is an uncanny overidentification with a typical semi-folk identity representing unresolved intercultural objectifications and fantasies. How is the "Greek identity" reproduced internationally? What is the imprint of the recent crisis in bilateral representations of the other? 

ΤΤΤ Building > 1st floor

How can a movement be political? And what does a body mean in the post-digital age? In their series Movements the performance company The Agency is concerned with the potential of physical and political movements and how they interface. With Medusa Bionic Rise they develop a fitness cult engaged in radical trans-human self-optimisation – in the grey area between self-control and self-empowerment. Inspired by the gaze of Medusa, the artists create the fiction of an underground movement in their immersive site-specific performance for AB6. 

The Agency has been working immersevely with the formats and narratives of neoliberalism since 2015. The Agency affirmatively overwinds these formats. The Agency takes up the strategies of branding, atmosphere and corporate identity aesthetically. The content dealt with revolves around technologies of self and body, post-human affinity and alienation. The Agency is Magdalena Emmerig, Belle Santos, Rahel Spöhrer and Yana Thönnes. They work with a group of sound designers, performers and dancers. The group lives and works in Munich and Berlin.

Artistic Direction: The Agency Magdalena Emmerig, Belle Santos, Rahel Spöhrer, Yana Thönnes with The Agency Nile Koetting, Stacyian Jackson, Jeremy Nedd, Lara Scherrieble, Hrefna Hoern Leifsdottir, Nastja Antonenko
Sound Design: Nile Koetting
Video & Website: Hoern Leifsdottir
Production Management: SISK – Sabine Klötzer

Limited capacity, book your seat now! 

TTT building > 4th floor > room 403

Shadow theater has a long tradition in Greece and the East. Karagioz, the folk hero, personifies the Ordinary Guy Archetype, a bit naive, a bit of a rascal, poor and beaten-up, trying to survive against the odds by utilizing folk wisdom and tons of luck. In Aggelopoulos's shadow theater, a mash-up of politicians, media figures, superheroes, cinema characters and villains-from Donald Trump and Slavoj Zizek to Rocky and Marina Abramovic-competes in an imaginary arena. Place your bets on the winner.