Wintering songs | Workshop by Eirini Vlavianou

Sunday 15 or Saturday 21 Jan 2023 (choose your day) | 12-3pm
TAF | The Art Foundation Normanou 5, Monastiraki 
Free admission 

Join us in an effort to examine and analyze traditional lullabies in relation to feminist struggles, ethnography, and semiotics. Through a creative manipulation we will create contemporary struggle cradle songs, casting out our pain and allowing space for our own needs to be heard while ultimately healing our individual and collective body.


Workshop description

Dismantling ideas around calculated time and productivity means creating a space in which rest is possible and postponing is an option. Westernised ideals valorise growth in terms of expansion, power, and brutality rather than viewing it as an effort to collectively grow and create kinships of care. 

In a time when pain and trauma are re-established into the new mental state, spaces of suspension seem to be an urgent requirement of our collective, terrestrial body while debris, waste, and noise are gaining more space. In this workshop, we would propose new ways of decolonising time structures by imagining a resting space, similar to a cradle, through the use of the practice of signing lullabies. 

The lullaby as a complex system of work and non-work, affection, and labor, effort and rest, is a ubiquitous yet elusive practice that could function as a “protective spell”, a new votive object exercise to exorcise colonisation and the legacy of noise. In this effort we will first examine traditional lullabies, analysing them in relation to feminist struggles, ethnography, and semiotics while later on performing a making of our own.

Through this creative manipulation, we will create contemporary struggle cradle songs, casting out our pain and allowing space for our needs to be heard while ultimately healing our individual and collective bodies.

Find out more about the artist

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