Documenta14, "Learning from Athens", Athens Conservatoire

Описание: When approaching the documenta 14 exhibition at Athens Conservatoire, it is worth considering the willfully mystic and modernist Greek composer Jani Christou. Early in days of documenta 14 in Athens, Christou’s idea of the “continuum” provided the experimental framework for working sessions between artists, curators, and the documenta 14 team. “Metapraxis,” another methodology that Christou pursued, “is concerned with breaking through the meaning barrier of a single medium, whatever that medium may be. Whenever that happens, that is music.” In considering the practices of composers like Christou, Pauline Oliveros, and the Scratch Orchestra of Cornelius Cardew, as well as of a new generation of artists, documenta 14 collectively attempts to reconsider “use.” Such an approach involves the audience in changes of habit, in which one substitutes expenditure for capital, appropriation for property, utility for preservation, gratuitous acts for discipline, and enjoyment for consumption.
One such attempt has been the process of helping restore the EMS Synthi 100, a rare analog synthesizer that KSYME-CMRC, an Athens music research center, purchased in the early 1970s. Until 2017, the modular synthesizer had been out of use for more than twenty years. The reactivation of the instrument makes it one of a handful of still-functional devices of its kind around the globe and is meant to foster the forward-thinking musicality that KSYME has strived for since its founding by Iannis Xenakis and Giannis G. Papaioannou in 1979. Four commissioned compositions for the instrument are being performed at Megaron for documenta 14, forming a relationship between the now “antique” machine and a new generation of Greek and international electronic musicians.