The Mountain Body

The Mountain Body is a participatory walk, making a bypass journey at sunrise, from the village of Agios Germanos to the village of Lemos in the mountain region of Prespa National Park. It recognizes body and mountains as forms ‘generated and sustained in and through…a total field of relations’ (Ingold, 1993). Further on and according to the Shambhala Tibetan Buddhist notion of ‘lha nyen la’, the Mountain Body walk creates an instruction set for audience participation to explore an embodiment of the place’s mountainous territory, the body of the mountain. Testimonies and songs from the life of the Greek Slavonian-Macedonian community are being heard along the way. Originating from a community found in the North-Western Greece that has been experiencing repression of its identity, the specific songs have come to be known as the forbidden songs as they have been banned being performed on a public site. Performing these songs in their landscape creates an act of recognizing and situating the invisible and the rejected. To suspend homogenous interpretations of the specific land such as place-ness and representation the Mountain Body creates a contemplative walking container within which the two ‘events’ that of the suppressed singing body and the mountainous landscape dwell within each other, connect and recover their common narrative.

In the performance are heard the following songs:
Edno maloj mome   (One little child)
Domakine (The Landlord)
Kaul si fatile  (A body and a girl made a bet)                                                                   

Concept: Anna Tzakou
Performers: Chrysoula Papadopoulou, Anna Tzakou

Agios Germanos, Prespes
5:30 am, July 2019

Created for:
International Encounters/Conference “WALKING PRACTICES/WALKING ART/WALKING BODIES, Prespes, Greece. July 1st to 7th, 2019

Organised by:
The Department of Fine and Applied Arts of the University of Western Macedonia