Georgia Sagri: IASI, Stage of Recovery

at De Appel, Amsterdam (28/09 - 18/1/21) (Iasi one-to-one sessions: 28/9 - 19/11/20, exhibition: 23/11 - 18/1/21)

The fuller meaning of IASI
IASI (‘recovery’ in Sagri’s native Greek) involves the recovery of health in the physical and mental sense without binary. The deeper, fuller breath of life. At the heart of Sagri’s process are questions so basic that they may have been forgotten: How well do we breathe? How to inhale as fully as we exhale? How to give as much as we take? IASI also emphasises remembering as part of recovery. For Sagri, this involves the reclamation – in the contemporary world – of a political horizon for performance established within Ancient Greek theatre. For example, at the Epidauros Amphitheatre in the Peloponnese, which rests near the Sanctuary of Asclepius (a god of medicine), we find evidence of the close relation between theatrical roles, civic participation and the beginning of medicinal categories – all of great inspiration to the artist. Indeed, her one-on-one treatments aim to reclaim or remind each person of the sense of the unique strength we each hold deep in our system, which is the basis of readiness for meaningful public encounters. (...)

About the exhibition
The first element built for the exhibition is a soft stage – a functional sculpture designed by Georgia Sagri especially for the one-on-one sessions of IASI. It is a modular sculpture with versions at Mimosa House in London and Tavros in Athens. While the specific scale of an oversized bed remains constant in all locations, the artist chooses differently dyed fabric to suit each setting. At de Appel, the deep crimson stage rests on top of the existing stage of the iconic Aula at Broedplaats Lely (formerly Pascal College, built in 1969 by Ben Ingwersen). The installation might give visitors a sense of the recovery of this public theatrical space for the purpose of personal strengthening. The perfect acoustics of the Aula further enhance the reclamation of breath and voice that lie at the heart of Sagri’s approach. Hanging high in the spacious Aula are Sagri’s full-bodied drawings. The charcoal and chalk pastels applied by the artist’s hands record the exchange of information and energy from the one-on-one sessions in Amsterdam. Together with those created from past sessions in London and in Athens, these drawings function as practical memory traces, as “sensorial references” and as scores for the continuing treatments. They can be apprehended as individual images and as a collective. During the exhibition, materials from the evolving history of performance art dating back to the 1970s, found in de Appel’s Archive, add depth and historical context to Sagri's pivotal practice. As this evocative ephemera enters into a dialogue with Sagri’s modular stage-sculpture and full-bodied drawings. Here, a number of questions arise:

What is/has been the artist’s role in society?
What is/has been the role of the public?
Can we conceive of performance art without a sense of spectacle?
What traditions of theater and/as therapy remain to be recovered?
How do we breathe better together?

The Sessions
(...) Following an open call (sent on August 3, 2020), the artist selected participants in Amsterdam, which she welcomes (September 28–19 November) inside the iconic Aula that de Appel refurbished last year for use as a public presentation space. One of the important criteria for accepting interested participants was their willingness to work together with the artist on their own recovery. Another was that each had a clear reason for entering this rigorous process. While IASI treatments are fully confidential, the artist has developed a system for recording what she learns with each case in such a way that the participants remain anonymous when these findings are shared with the public.

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iasi

at Tavros Space, Athens (5 - 27/6 & 17/9 - 24/10/20)

IASI begins at the start of us all. Our breathing bodies. Few of us really comprehend how much we limit our breath. How much we limit our living. Our ability to take in the world and to inhale, this our ultimate most vital act of sharing; in turn, as we exhale, perhaps our most generous act of giving. This rhythmic circularity has been interrupted as we seemingly gasp for air: the reverberations are political and existential. How much oxygen are we allowed in a world going up in flames? Stifled, unable to breathe, and speak, not just for the sake of the words but in order to be heard.

IASI, Georgia Sagri’s ongoing research practice which started almost ten years ago in the form of self-training and which continues at her studio and artist run space Ύλη[matter]HYLE in Athens, now takes on a new form of one-on-one sessions with participants that have responded to an open call. These sessions are based on physical techniques that use breath as an active agent, movement and voice training. The sessions, two or three times a week over a period of two months, are private. Intensely so. They take place on a specially designed soft stage, an art object but also a welcoming place, a shell of sorts. This “stage of recovery” is based on Georgia Sagri’s premise that, “we all live our lives on stage, endlessly performing. The “stage of recovery” is a place where the participants can, for a while, be freed from the necessity of performing to others and for themselves. It gives them the time to be safe and free from an audience.” Whatever shifts, releases or movements occur in these private interchanges remains undisclosed. Unrepresented; still, they are.

New forms however demand new languages, and with IASI, Sagri sets the terms of the game. At the crossroads between activism, performance and self-recovery, this new phase in her practice is also a quest for an appropriate wording. Bodies in IASI birth their own cosmologies, circumventing scientific and empirical terminologies and allowing for intuited responses. Following each session Sagri summarizes written reports whose origin lies in the liminal moments of a body in treatment. Language, terminologies, rules, time-lapse as new forms of existing appear as fragile intermediaries between the then and the now. IASI is nothing less then, than a search for a new vocabulary, an original script for a new way of being and a movement for caring of oneself and others. IASI is also a search for new formats, where time is given and taken for reflection and research, where what is visible and what isn’t, is to be seen. Following the sessions, Sagri, using all her tactile forces, colors out primal imprints, like memory skins. This series of visual impressions of the accumulated bodily experiences (chronic pains and releases) form, alongside the reports and performances, the formal backbone of the resulting exhibition. Throughout the duration of the exhibition there will be sense of perennial impermanence with works by Georgia Sagri appearing or shifting, hinting at constantly fluctuating temporalities, with each work re-contextualized each time in dialogue with each other. The exhibition will itself be a living form, dilating and compressing, even holding its breath in between. This new chapter of her research will develop in overlapping phases in three art institutions and three cities – Mimosa House (London), TAVROS (Athens), De Appel (Amsterdam) and at her studio ‘Υλη[matter]HYLE – knowledge accrued from one location will be carried to the next, enriching the process. Sagri’s presence in these concurrent spaces will mirror the constant disembodiment in the multiplicity of images (our split screen personalities) with which we diffuse and ‘read’ ourselves. Georgia Sagri, adept at loops, here includes this circularity as part of the very form of her research. Instead of performing in large concentric circles, connectivity in all three locations will be personal. One step at a time. One breath at a time, reaching out. It is this prescient demand for human contact and for a new social contract that brings IASI here to TAVROS. Reflecting our belief that art might no longer concern purely material exchange but will return to other value systems that use action to counter worldly and somatic alienation and that our bodies still have the capacity to rewire, release and be receptive to care and love. IASI provides the basis for a discussion on bodies (as celestial as they are mundane), stillness (through abstention) and voice (as the precondition for political beings). Our pain and subjectivity is removed from the world of things but as it surfaces collectively we have the chance to start on a process of recovery and perhaps a new chapter of living.

Breath, after all is urgent. Bodies, after all are beautiful.

Allies: Mimosa House, De Appel

Supported by and under the auspices of: the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sport

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GEORGIA SAGRI: IASI

at Mimosa House, London (Iasi one-to-one sessions: 13/1-19/3/20, exhibition: 14/2 [closed due to COVID until September]-10/10/20)

From January to March of 2020, Sagri worked with individual participants via private and anonymous one-to-one sessions as part of her research into self-care and recovery – IASI, a 10 year long body of research which includes voice tuning, breathing exercises and movement techniques. The exhibition in September (which began in January and prematurely closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic) showcased the case studies developed over the three month period, taking shape in the form of performances, objects, drawings and writings by the artist. A screening of a performance by Sagri titled Breathing (5-1-5) which took place in Mimosa House in March 2020 was featured as well.

Sagri’s ongoing research was the basis for her iconic work Dynamis, which featured at documenta 14 (Kassel and Athens, 2017) and involved sharing these techniques with 200+ members of the public across the two cities. During this process, Sagri observed an improvement in the general wellbeing of participants, and continues to explore the stages of recovery in her work, IASI.

The collaboration with Mimosa House is Georgia Sagri’s first institutional exhibition in the UK, and is also the inauguration of her research practice IASI, and her long-term commitment to working directly with the public. This chapter of her research is being developed in overlapping phases across three international organisations, each of which will host Sagri’s one-to-one sessions, research and respective case studies. The organisations are Mimosa House in the United Kingdom, TAVROS in Greece, and De Appel in the Netherlands.

In February 2020, Sagri introduced her project IASI at Mimosa House, in conversation with institutional allies Daria Khan (Mimosa House, United Kingdom), Maria-Thalia Carras (TAVROS, Greece), and Monika Szewczyk (De Appel, The Netherlands) – a video of the conversation is available to view here: https://youtu.be/m8C8fhRadlE

Addressing the pathologies of our time, Georgia Sagri identifies her role in this process: “... to support, listen and navigate with each participant the compass of their discomfort, and its causes and effects. The treatments are approached as a creative practice, in which we work together through voice, gesture and movement techniques. Each participant will find movements and behaviours that allow them to learn from their pain, become stronger and empowered, and facilitate the potential of further self-recovery”

On the project, curator and Mimosa House founder Daria Khan has said: “Georgia Sagri’s ‘IASI’ brings a unique and new opportunity to Mimosa House: to explore the impact of artistic practice on the public, as well as to ask wider questions about artist labour, self-care and pathologies of our time. ‘IASI’ is an experiment in establishing in-depth collaboration with individual members of the audience, through a process of sharing knowledge and bodily practice which have a long lasting effect beyond the exhibition’s timeframe and space.”

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