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2023 Koumaria Residency Blog 07

By August 29, 2023August 29th, 2024Blog

In response to the notions of a frail femineity, Skinofagi is a choreographic exploration of moving images that reflect on how the inner dynamics of feminine rites of passage can be strong, harsh, and even violent set also in a wild, obscure, dangerous and unsupervised context.

The name Skinofagi comes from a particular anecdote. I (Marili) went alongside artist resident Tianyi and Medea members Kleopatra and Haris to interview a small café owner from the village, Kostas. Tianyi and I had casually talked about learning some of the towns urban legends or ghost stories and Medea members arranged the meeting. We were actually surprised to discover one (and only one) story about the presence of a cannibal troupe residing in a ruin close to town.
Kostas recalled that when he was little, his parents warned him and his friends not to go pigeon-hunting near those ruins because, according to them, cannibals resided there. The story went that a beautiful girl from the village once married a man that lived by the ruins and when on to live with him and his family. Not so long after, during a community celebration, she was asked to serve dinner to the crowd from a big pot and was surprised to discover that a human hand (with ring and all), was part of the stew. The girl closed the pot and fled to her village and never again returned.
Skinofagi (Greek for flesh-eaters) was the word given by Kostas to describe the villagers. Another thing that he noted and somewhat triggered my imagination for the piece came from a posterior discussion with Kleopatra. She noted Kostas was emphatic on the danger the girl from the story went because ‘she was beautiful and they would definitely eat her!’.  The idea that beauty, and specifically, feminine beauty is inextricably and in many contexts, designed for and/or in risk of consumption is to me an underlying horror story, somewhat cross-culturally present and unnoted by most.

Performance by Pelagia Tsakalidou and Elli Skourogianni
Choreography by Marili Pizzaro

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