BORDERLINE –
Video by Fenia Kotsopoulou
Year of production: (December 2015)
Location: Spiantza Ilias (Greece)
Concept/performance/camera/edit: Fenia Kotsopoulou
«Where should we go after the last frontiers ?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky ? «.
by Mahmoud Darwish.
An infinite horizontal line of bodies attempting to cross the sea, leaving traces of a destroyed past merged with the sand. And in the meantime the sound of the sea…
While the West still struggles to find solutions for the “refugee crisis”, the main route towards peace and hope remains passage through the Mediterranean Sea.
In 2015 alone, of the almost one million refugees* and migrants attempting to cross these blue waters desperately fleeing war, violence, terrorism, and persecution : over three and a half thousand have lost their lives.
In 2016, Greek islands keep on battling odds to cope with refugee influx. On the other side of the cost, Turkey is already hosting over 2.5 million Syrians and also shouldering one of the greatest responsibility in sheer numbers in this humanitarian international crisis. Fishing boats crowded with men, women and children from Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia try to cross from Egypt to Italy but they don’t arrive to their destination.
What relies behind these numbers and facts is the human desire and longing for that place «after the last frontiers…after the last sky»; a place that still remains unknown…a place that we still dream of..
*data based on reports be the UN Refugee Agency: data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.php
Selections:
– selected for IVAHM Festival 16 @ Neomudejar: 5-15 May 2016 in Madrid Spain
– selected for Ephesus Street Video Art: 18th of April in Secluk (Turkey), Izmir and Instabul.
– selected for “Refugee!” Collective Trauma Film Collections- part of the curatorial selection of CologneOFF 2016, at the 10th CeC – Carnival of e-Creativity: 26-28 February 2016 in Shillong, India.
About the author:
Fenia Kotsopoulou is a Greek cross-disciplinary artist who straddles performance art and site-specific performance, dance and videography. She currently lives in England (Lincoln) where she graduated from University of Lincoln’ s MFA Choreographing Live Art. She holds a BA honours in dance from the national dance academy of Rome (Italy) and a BA honours in italian literature and language from the Aristotle university of Thessalonikis (Greece). Her dance training background consists of diverse dance styles (modern, contemporary, release, jazz, primitive dance) as well improvisation, voice and movement, traditional dances, contact improvisation).
She develops interactive and site specific performances, as well as creating short dance and documentation videos. She is mainly inspired from the daily life and every detail related to human interaction with technology and nature, gender roles and diversity, social and political issues. The body as gathering place of emotions, personal and collective memory, fragmentation, transformation, the performativity of documentation are some of the pivotal topics of her projects/performances.
In search of an holistic way to express her vision (and based on a rhizomatic approach of making art) she collaborates with artists from different fields/cultural backgrounds. Part of her artistic research is on revisiting REBETIKO – a Greek urban folk genre of the 20th century of music and dance. She is interested to discover how tradition can influence a contemporary dance and performance setting or to become rich source for socially engaged art projects.
In 2013, as part of her studies, her activity extended towards curatorial practices. She created/curated the first edition of the mini festival “Interconnectivity & Live Art”, which was held in the Lincoln performing arts centre. Currently she collaborates with the sound/video artist Daz Disley and co-organize with Pavlos Kountouriotis the GNARL Fest 2014 a festival in Live Art and Choreography.
