Rooms of Memory: Wandering into Loula Anagnostaki’s World
Curated by Dimitra Kondylaki

A ‘theatrical’ city made up of twelve distinct rooms, as many as Loula Anagnostaki’s plays: The City, The Overnight Stay, The Parade, The Interaction, Antonio, or the Message, The Victory, The Cassette, The Sound of the Gun, Diamonds and Blues, The Journey Away, Deep Red Sky, To You Who Are Listening to Me. The enclosed, dreamlike space, so prominent in her theatre – inspired by the Theatre of the Absurd, which has influenced Anagnostaki’s plays, especially her early works – has informed the concept of this scenographic installation, reintroducing us to the dramatist’s oeuvre, inviting us to engage with her body of work and connect with it.
This installation is predicated, on the one hand, on the notion of the room – the enclosed stage where history unfolds – and, on the other hand, the notion of memory: the area of imagination, the link between the past and the present, the collective and the individual coming alive through the traces left behind by the images, sounds, objects, poetic landscapes which can be found inside every room. We are deconstructing Anagnostaki’s plays across space in order to re-read her oeuvre through the eyes of the imagination; eyes capable of distinguishing between ‘colours, movements, postures, relationships that remain undefinable,’ as Karolos Koun used to say.
Nobody is able to fully control the mechanisms of memory: when memory is triggered, when it is lost, when it leads to construction and when to deconstruction, when it leads to togetherness and when to separation. The memories of individuals bound together by shared experiences never actually fall in line with each other; never quite add up.
‘The most important thing when it comes to memory – the reason why memory holds such great power – is trauma.’ By outlining the area of the trauma, Loula Anagnostaki’s theatre both conceals and reveals, bringing to the surface the distortion which comes as the result of conforming to dated social models, obsolete ideologies, frustrated relationships, dysfunctional families. Her theatre draws on the tropes of trauma in order to rearrange the past and the present, approaching that unspeakable, hidden part of ourselves which hurts the most, mocking our fears, our diffidence and hypocrisy, exposing a lust for life which is invariably contradicted or turns into ashes whenever individual histories clash with collective History.
With Rooms of Memory we are attempting to re-enact the inner ‘feel’ of each play, but also recreate the mental conditions under which these very works came to life. Guided by the plays themselves and the various significant findings – manuscripts, recordings, photographs – that our archival research brought to light, we are trying to enter the creative mind of Loula Anagnostaki, an incisive, expressive, intuitive, unselfconscious, unclassifiable and poignantly subjective writer. We invite visitors to engage, even playfully so, in the representation of her career and life, going back and forth from history to the work of a singular mind and a singular writing style that keeps hauntingly coming back to us.

Dimitra Kondylaki

Free admission
Opening hours: 19:00-24:00
Opening on June 3rd at 19:00

A three-day dramaturgy-scenography workshop was held on 20-22 April 2018 on the occasion of this exhibition with the participation of students from the Department of Interior Architecture of the University of Western Attica and the School of Architecture of the Technical University of Crete.
The workshop was entitled: “From the dramatic to the architectural space based on set design. Visual/space approached on the occasion of the exhibition on Loula Anagnostaki”

THE TRIBUTE INCLUDES:

3 June - 19 July (Peiraios 260, A)
Retrospective - exhibition: “Rooms of Memory. Wandering into Loula Anagnostaki’s World”

10-12 June (Peiraios 260, B)
The City, dir. Yiannis Moschos

11 June (Peiraios 260, A)
Symposium with the participation of artists, theorists and writers

17-19 June (Peiraios 260 B & E)
Loula Anagnostaki: A Construction Site, dir. Roula Pateraki