The Dancing Voice of Youth
Α girl with a mysterious background arrives at the city, whose existence gradually becomes as light as the floating air. In the dark night of a chaotic age, must we live like specters?
I’ve always wanted to see a martian
An astronaut finds herself stranded on a foreign planet. Her initial fear gives way to an insatiable need to experience this new planet with all her senses. The astronaut tries to find her footing between the urge to conquer and surrender.
ORFEAS 2021
The first gay prime minister of Greece struggles to carry the legacy of LGBT history at a time of post-truth alt-right dystopia. The mysterious algorithm of the collective unconscious and heavy-handed tradition of “the land of heroes” proves unshakable. Will liberal Europe and its so-called ‘freedom of speech’ provide an alternative or is it just another platform for neo-reactionary culture wars?
A retro-futurist story of utopian politics, ideological conflicts, supernatural leaders and totalitarian spectacle. Cyberpunk queer pirates against rainbow homo-capitalist normies. Revolution vs reformism; logic vs affect. The trappings of post-internet identity politics through a contemporary take of the myth of Orpheus.
Oscillating between operatic melodrama, queer DIY collage, 80s-inspired post-trash hauntology and VR/AI aesthetics, the film creates a kaleidoscopic take on political purity, alternative histories and institutional critique. The synthetic consciousness of techno-utopian inevitability seems to have transformed from post-human complexity to deepfake apocalypse. In the end, melancholy, trauma and despair are the only remnants (and perhaps weapons) on the bruised body of political movements.
The opera references the murder of LGBTQI+ activist Zak Kostopoulos, who was a friend and collaborator of the OFREAS2021 creative team. On the afternoon of September 21st 2018, two men initiated a brutal assault on Kostopoulos, relentlessly kicking him as he lay defenceless on the ground. The men claimed he was robbing a jewelry store; according to eye-witnesses and footage from the scene, this is a complete falsehood. The opera was written in the months after Zak’s murder, in part as a response to the sense of loss/fury we felt.
FYTA is a conceptual audiotextual performance duo, consisting of Fil Ieropoulos and Foivos Dousos. Since 2012 they have participated in a number of events as performers, but also as curators. They were founding members of the queer music label Fytini (with over 30 releases), the performance art platform Sound Acts (presenting the work of 80+ artists in Athens), as well as various other projects within the local art queer scene. They have collaborate amongst others with the Athens School of Fine Arts, ATOPOS cvc, Freud Museum (London), Athens Biennale, while their texts and papers have been presented in academic spaces in Greece and Europe.
