Crushed Bitter Oranges

Performance, 2023
Duration: 30 min
Creation, video, texts, performed by: VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis)

Crushed Bitter Oranges is a multiform performance presented in relation to Slavs and Tatars’ installation “Pickle Bar”. It addresses notions of exhaustion, fatigue, referring to things running out, materials being consumed, depleted reserves and reduced endurance. VASKOS use camp and queer methodologies, dialogues inspired by the emblematic formula “I would prefer not to” by Herman Melville’s character Bartleby, as well as by major avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp’s interviews. The performance is in relation with video-performances shot in the streets of Athens thematizing the presence of bitter oranges as a multilayered metaphor. The crushed bitter oranges, an image from the streets of Athens that is quite familiar, are a metaphor for, and a political commentary on the city around us that is changing rapidly, following the dictates of development, touristification of culture, optimization and intensification. A reference to a social normative model that tries to exhaust the potential of the city, its structures, its people.

Wasted music and neon lights in the daytime. But the struggles and demands continue despite frustration, despite exhaustion. The crushed bitter oranges are bitter, uneaten, lying crushed on the city sidewalks. They dwell parasitically and ephemerally. They look funny and outdated. But they are here. (VASKOS)

Presented at the “Pickle Bar” installation by Slavs and Tatars, co-curated by Dora Vasilakou, in the framework of the touring exhibition EVROVIZION.CROSSING STORIES AND SPACES by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) in cooperation with Goethe-Institut Athen and EMST, 7 June 2023, Goethe-Institut Athen, Greece.

Photographs by Eftychia Vlachou