A Weaver’s Tales
An artistic research on storytelling, in order to expose the ways it can affect our perception, as well as to generate the potentiality of re-inventing and re-writing all kinds of stories. As specific narrative structures and patterns often are identifiable - whether one refers to a fairytale or a comic book, a history book or a caustic newspaper sketch, a memory, a rumor - stories often intend to serve as knowledge about one’s ancestors, as guidance to religious beliefs, as filter of differentiation between good and evil, right and wrong, as gossip, as social and political manipulation. Stories have the power to humanize or marginalize a person, a people, a culture. Who has the authority to decide which story is more important than the other? Who is to decide who and how these stories are told, why, when and how many aspects of a story are they mentioned?
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A Weaver’s Tales is an artistic installation, an attempt to touch upon issues of identity, by focusing in the idea of multiplicity through relation and, therefore, of immanent potentiality. It is a project which investigates different formats, translations and appropriations of narration, oscillating between heritage and memory, facts and myths. The role of the spectator is equally important: he/she is invited to participate, to not only see and hear but, also, to re-invent existent or to re-write personal stories. Recognition is natural and inevitable, Hence, the aim is not to deny recognition, but to momentarily suspend the thought and create an awareness of what this over-coding of the body entails and how we can broaden our perception, in order to delay categorization.
Artistic Creator and Curator: Penelope Morout
Artistic Research Advisor: João da Silva
Dramaturgical Practice Advisor: Pedro Cardoso Rodrigues Manuel
Documentation and Photography: Daz Disley, Fenia Kotsopoulou
Video credits: Kleoniki Agiostratiti (on camera) and Dora Dimitriou (off camera)
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Special thanks to Kleoniki Morout and Voula Morout for their participation to this creative storytelling documentation, to Pavlos Kountouriotis for his valuable feedback and support, as well as to all my peers and friends for sharing their stories with me.