Ithaca: upon every arrival is an intermedia performance/installation incited by the constant cultural flows dramatically increasing over recent years. In our personal lives, we move voluntarily or not through geographical areas for better opportunities, political reasons, our loved ones. In our creative lives, we traverse boundaries amongst fields, building bridges. Ithaca investigates the process of integration into a new destination, which entails a redefinition of one’s image/identity and their relationship with space, time, their body and the others.

Five artists and five creative disciplines (choreography, design, visual arts, sound art and spoken word) unravel their individual timelines through phases inspired by Jacques Lacan’s “Mirror Stage”. The visitors explore the sequence of transformations that a person experiences upon arriving at her Ithaca, until the decision moment: “Is this where I aspire to be?”. The mechanism then starts over and upon every arrival (repetition) the artefacts produced, through performative apparatuses and human bodies, keep building up sculptural formations. Each visitor performs his/her own journey inside the installation. Every time the piece travels to be reperformed it adapts and evolves, responding to the new conditions: site, people and time.

At every Ithaca

“Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge,
Following the sun, of the unpeopled world.”

Inferno, Dante
Translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“I do not know if consequences forced me to leave
or because I needed to escape from myself-
…
At any rate, this was not the solution, but only a half-measure
From then on I wallowed from street to street
acquiring wounds and experience.
…
I bring Poseidon within me,
who always keeps me far off;
but even if I could put into harbor,
could Ithaca possibly find me the solution?”

Ithaca, Dinos Christianopoulos

“And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.” 

Ithaka, Constantine P. Cavafy
Translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard