Description

The Greek National Opera’s online festival Waves of Light, in collaboration with the PPC and curated by Giorgos Koumendakis, features the first series of site-specific performances inspired by the Megalopolis Steam Power Station.


AUTOMATΑ

Industrial Echoes

Christina Georgiou – Department of Music Studies (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
Industrial Echo. An acoustic journey through the corridors of the Megalopoli steam power station. The sound brings the narrator’s memory to life, retrieving snapshots from a monument of industrial heritage. The sounds of electric power emphasise the factory’s contribution to the spread of energy as a common good in Greece and to the country’s overall development and prosperity. Combined with sounds from the station itself and the narrator’s voice, they invite audiences to a journey across space and time. The video also features scenes and snapshots from the factory’s operations, illustrating some of the challenges faced by the people there and highlighting the factory’s importance as well as its emergence as a landmark of a place that will never be the same again.

The Greek National Opera assigned the organisation of a cross-university / interdisciplinary arts workshop focused on the Megalopolis Steam Power Station to the Department of Performing and Digital Arts at the University of the Peloponnese, involving eight university arts departments from across Greece. As part of the online festival titled Waves of Light, 20 young artists and artistic teams from university departments throughout Greece drew inspiration from the striking sites of the old PPC factory in Megalopolis to create 20 new site-specific digital works for GNO TV, the GNO’s digital platform. These works are grouped into various genres that fall within the broader fields of performing, visual, and digital arts. The music and scripts in these works are inspired by the spaces, history, and people who worked there.
Participating in this workshop were students from the following departments: Department of Music Studies (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), Department of Visual and Applied Arts (University of Western Macedonia), Department of Culture and Creative Media and Industries (University of Thessaly), Department of Theatre Studies (University of Patras), Department of Sound and Image Arts (Ionian University – undergraduate and postgraduate programmes), and the Athens School of Fine Arts.
PPC, a leader in Greece’s electrification through its emblematic factories, has evolved into an active cultural agent, offering its historical sites as a canvas for contemporary artistic creation. Through the Waves of Light online festival, PPC contributes to repurposing industrial landmarks into vibrant reference points between the past and the future, where energy meets art.

Creative team – Cast