Housewarming: The Broken pitcher with Marina Christodoulidou, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Dimitris Chimonas

Schedule:

14:30 - 15:00
Doors open

15:00 - 16:00
Warm-up: Participatory performance with Dimitris Chimonas

Break & introduction to the film

16:30 - 17:30
The Broken Pitcher: Film screening

17:30 - 18:30
Conversation with Marina Christodoulidou, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Dimitris Chimonas

RSVP required: there is a limited capacity for this program, please reserve a spot by mailing reservations@deappel.nl.

The Broken Pitcher, 2022
A project by
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, Peter Eramian
with
Raissa Angeli, Dimitris Chimonas, Stelios Kallinikou, Athina Kassiou, Orestis Lambrou, Orestis Lazouras, Panagiotis Mina (Pyrgatory Studios), Faysal Mroueh, Keti Papadema, Nayia Savva, Nikos Stephou, Maria Toumazou, Rumen Tropchev and Emiddio Vasquez a.o.

Tracing the effects of financialisation and austerity, the film attends to a concrete case: A crucial meeting at a bank, negotiating the foreclosure of a family home in Larnaka, Cyprus in 2019. Inspired by Abbas Kiarostami’s film First Case, Second Case (1979, Iran), the filmed reenactment of the bank meeting is shown to people from various backgrounds who are asked to respond to the question: “In your opinion what should the bank employees do?”. The responses encompass perspectives of people from different interest groups in Cyprus and beyond, including housing rights activists in Barcelona, Berlin and Beirut, persons who are similarly affected by these policies, public figures, lawyers, economists and artists. Foreclosure is one of the austerity measures that were imposed on the Cypriot government by the Troika (the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) after the financial crisis in 2012. The Broken Pitcher situates the case in relation to the colonial history of finance, debt and property and seeks out potentials for changing the script of interacting with it.

As an introduction to screening The Broken Pitcher, we join a one-hour warm-up session with games facilitated by Dimitris Chimonas, echoing Augusto Boal’s methodologies of Theatre of the Oppressed, where participants assume the roles of spect-actors. In search of alternative dialogue formats, after the screening, the film directors discuss the process of making the film and its various aspects. Then, they open up the conversation and invite the attendees to actively participate by attempting to shift the film’s narrative. In a venture to engage and collectivize around the urges of our living situations and forms of dispossession, the story unfolds by asking: Where do we dwell?

Marina Christodoulidou (Cyprus) is an independent researcher and curator. Traversing curatorial formats, her practice emerges from critical, artist-led infrastructures and self-organized initiatives. On the crossroads between disciplines, Marina’s reading of Cyprus history and historiography, acts as a departure point for her research and approach to decolonial praxis. Marina has previously worked for the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale (2015-19), and co-curated the Anachoresis project which represented Cyprus at the Architecture Biennale (2021). Among other collective projects Marina has been part of, the Broken Pitcher (2020-) is an ongoing collaborative project that has been presented in public squares across Cyprus, at Thkio Ppalies, Nicosia; Beirut Art Center; GfZK, Leipzig; Lenbachhaus, Munich and makes way to independent film theaters and festivals. Marina is currently a research fellow at de Appel with a focus on land, housing, and self-governance, affiliated with a cooperative program at DAI, titled Assembling Land: Rehearsals towards Place-making.

Throughout her practice, Natascha Sadr Haghighian (Iran/ Germany) explores questions of collectivity and community. Her solo and collaborative works take form in installations, video and audio works, as well as performative interventions to imagine infrastructures and conditions of collectivity. Departing from current and historical events, the artist addresses mutual interdependencies, spaces of action, and the complex scopes of technology, politics and systems of value creation. She regards her mostly installation-based works as spaces for a sensual renegotiation of community, which call on us to understand migration as a constituent part of existence. A collaborative working method and ramified, at times deliberately obscured authorship are characteristic of her approach. Natascha represented Germany in the 2019 Venice Biennale and took part in Documenta 13 and 14.

Dimitris Chimonas (Cyprus) is an artist working across theater, performance, film, and sculpture. His work investigates theater conventions, devices, and frames, strategies of participation, and the construction of collectivities. He presented work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2015 -2016); the Benaki Museum (Athens, 2016); the Young Artists Biennale (Tirana, 2017); the Prague Quadrennial of Space Design & Performance (2019); Hot Wheels Athens (2019); Cabaret Voltaire (2021); GfZK Leipzig (2023). He also conceived and directed the opening and closing ceremonies of the International Festival Cyprus Film Days 2023, amongst others. In 2022 he curated and co-organized Sessions: a programme of queer happenings, in Nicosia, Cyprus with Lex Gregoriou, presenting an extensive showcase of the local queer scene, with a follow-up “take-over” of the State Gallery of Contemporary Art - SPEL, from June to December 2023. Dimitris was formerly a fellow at the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut (2018-2019).