After the Crisis

Reality starts with stories. There is a great deal of truth even in the most fictional ones, because through them we reflect who we are and what is our relation to others and to our current times, we can heal the past or envision our future. CIRCLE #1 provides an infrastructure for storytelling. It suggests a communitarian use of the exhibition space, based on the collaborative creation of stories. The stories are oral. 

We are delighted present the outcome of Valentina Karga’s workshop for collaborative storytelling, based on her artwork CIRCLE #1 (presented within Performing the Fringe). Expert Dimitris Savvaidis and participants Lili Huston Herterich, Emelie Wingårdh and Yari Stilo narrate their collective story After the Crisis, composed during the workshop. Enjoy!

Emelie Wingårdh
Emelie is based in Lofoten in the north of Norway. Her main medium is film, often with text as points of departure. Her practice involves capturing the world as it is rather than staging it, collecting these moments and creating some kind of personal archive. The main artistic interest right now is space, and humans in it or as a part of it - which in turn is part of the bigger process where science is used to create a perspective on a more subjective humanity, or as a tool for talking about feelings.

Lili Huston-Herterich
Lili Huston-Herterich is an artist who works with sculpture, photography, sound, video, and performance. She aims to trace the ideas, people, materials, methods, history, and inheritance her work emerges from. She is currently living in Stockholm where she is a Research Intern at Index Foundation this summer. Normally, she is based in Rotterdam.

Yari Stilo
Yari is based in Stockholm, where he works mostly as a care assistant. He has a background as a professional dancer and performer. His artistic interests often start from a very personal experience and concern questions of identity, self-image, and vulnerability. He has a practice that intersects with dance, sound, and moving image. Lately, he loves dancing tango as a follower, and he works as an assistant choreographer for Mirko Guido.

Dimitris Savvaidis
Dimitris Savvaidis (1976) was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. Soon after he figured out that he wanted to tell stories, he discovered comics and animation as his main medium to do so. He has published in various Greek comic magazines (Babel,Parapente,9,Galera and more) while his short stories were awarded a best short story of the year 2005 and 2009 in ComicDom Con Athens. His album Microcosmoi was nominated for best album of the year 2008. In 2009 – 10 he had a weekly 4page comic series in the most popular greek sports newspaper, SportDay. In collaboration with a team of interdisciplinary artists, he has created several short animation movies that have been shown in greek and foreign animation festivals and exhibitions. In 2010 he had a TV show named Cofix Wiggler about broadcasted in local TV channels and the internet. He often lectures in Greece and abroad about animation and story telling and teaches scriptwriting, comics and animation in Thessaloniki since 2003. He is the founder of the annual festival TAF (Thessaloniki Animation Festival) and the animation studio AddArt and co-organized many cultural events in his city, country and abroad, with a focus to raise awareness through arts and culture about various socially sensitive subjects. Since 2010, he has been guiding meditations about evolving the human condition and consciousness. He participated as a trainer in workshops and training courses for Peace, Meditation, Mindfulness, Storytelling, Animation and Comics in Greece and in many EU countries. 

Valentina Karga
Valentina Karga’s work operates between art, design, research, and architecture. It draws together elements of socially engaged practices and speculative exper- iments that question the existing social and physical infrastructures within the realms of energy, economy, and sustainability. Among others, her work has been shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, transmediale festival in Berlin, Athens Biennial, Thailand Biennial, Moscow Biennial for Young Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki,and a major exhibition, ‘A Thousand Doors’, curatedby Whitechapel Gallery. Since 2018 she is a professor at Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK), Hamburg.