Filippos Tsitsopoulos: What you kill, you should also love

Curated by: Konstantinos Argianas
Organization: Klitsa Antoniou
Project Production: George Lazoglou

Invited artist of the Library Project I was the internationally renowned Greek performer and visual artist Filippos Tsitsopoulos. On Saturday, November 9, at 19.30, at the Municipal University Library, Tsitsopoulos performed the action entitled What you kill, you should also love; an enigmatic phrase borrowed (and slightly paraphrased) from the emblematic text of the German playwright and poet Heiner Müller, The Hamlet Machine (1977). By wearing makeshift masks composed of meat, fish, fruit and vegetables, and with references both to the bizarre portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo and to the "distortions" of German Expressionism, Tsitsopoulos constructed both a hybrid and a grotesque, Shakespearean persona opening an extraordinary dialogue with the site of the library, as well as the viewers. By reading from selected modern European literary works (Heiner Müller, Thomas Berhnard, Peter Weiss, etc.), as well as, from Greek ones (Michael Mitsakis, Platon Rodocanakis, Epaminondas Gonatas, etc.), Tsitsopoulos addresses concepts that have always been a major concern of humanity: love, pain, mortality and, ultimately, death.