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.


MARKS
Sophia Xanthou

Three stories from the creator’s private archive retrieve events that occurred in the Greek province during the 1950s. The narrator recalls and recounts stories about the place where she was born and raised, in the region of western Samos. These stories reflect on life before the introduction of electricity, following the trajectory of the stars, the changes that occurred, and an unexpected ending.
The creator’s performance in front of the camera mimics the factory’s nonstop operation viewed in relation to a household’s continuous activities. Two interdependent energy and life generators interconnected by labour, manual work, and a sequence of methodical movements.
The factory provides jobs for thousands of people, along with electric power produced from water and underground deposits. The performance comments on the transition to an era when industry invaded people’s lives and their land in a defining manner. With the establishment of the factory in Megalopoli, agriculture was replaced by lignite mining. The duality of black and white, along with that of lignite and flour (the valuable byproduct of grains), provokes thoughts about the cost of industrialisation and its impact on the exploitation of the earth, including its underground resources and agriculture.

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

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