Ascent Rehearsals
"Ascent rehearsals" are open to all weekly excursions to Strefi Hill, a hill in the middle of Athens. Every Sunday 12: 00-14: 00 until April, we try a different way to climb the hill.
1/4 "Being Strefi": What if Strefi Hill was someone's mind? What kind of thoughts we would discover, while wandering around? What kind of possible hill-personalities could emerge?
25/3 "Out of time & space". We let ourselves be guided on the hill in terms of parallel time/spatial realities. "Keep walking. Say hello to Miss Georgia. Climb up this small wooden staircase. Smell the fresh made coffee. This is my working desk." Can you see it?
18/3 "Making scenography out of the hill". A performer dances on the hill's rock. She tries to conquer it. What interventions on the landscape does this action inspire?
11/3 "Time routines of the hill". We track the different "rhythms" of the hill: the movements and pauses that exist in the life within and outside the hill, as well as the flows connecting it to the city. Which routines define this "natural" landscape of the city?
4/3 "Role playing atmoshperes of the hill". We explore different qualities of routes within Strefi Hill. We present them through role playing in order to capture the different untold atmospheres of Strefi.
25/2 "The doors of the hill": We climb from the dense urban web to the top of the hill, locating different entrances and transitions from the time of the city to the time of the hill.
Sunday ascents are designed on Wednesday before each climb, at an open meeting from 16: 00-19: 00.
Meeting point and starting point: 50 Kallidromiou Street, "Exarheia residents' initiative.
Each Sunday ascent is an open playful expolation of the hill, borrowing tools from physical exercise, community action, landscape research, sensory mapping, visual approaches, site specific performance.
"Ascent Rehearsals" are part of UrbanDig_Ushakova project, through which we explore our relationship with "free time" in the city's everyday life. Escaping from the city to the nearby hill, we attempt to collectively create a vocabulary of free time in the city, with terms coming from the landscape itself: hill typologies, obstacles, accesses, atmospheres, senses are all spatial representations of free time in a busy city.
Within UrbanDig_Ushakova project, different teams also create:
- A board-game focusing on the use of time, collective processes and social technologies in problem-solving,
- A series of performances in Malta (Valletta Cultural Capital 2018) and Athens (World Book Capital 2018)
- A site-specific performance on Strefi Hill in May 2018 inspired by all above findings as well as by the personality of Gabriella Ushakova, a historical figure - local prostitute in the 20th c that found a way to reconsile between "free" and "working" time in quite an inspirational way.
Photo: Haris Papadimitropoulos - Paola Velasko - Maria Velasco
