Rehearsals for an Island

The Greek island of Kastellorizo—located in the Dodecanese archipelago of the southern Aegean Sea—became the stage for activities, workshops, performances, installations, and lectures spanning a week in September 2015. The burning sun at the start and the end of a long, turbulent summer did little to dispel the atmosphere of impending doom and anxiety, which colored the events despite its idyllic setting. From the sovereign debt crisis to the refugee crisis, Greece had become a byword for economic, social, and political upheaval. Aptly reflected in the title of the Kastellorizo program, and drawn from a poem by Frank O’Hara, violence was in the air.

The violent No!. . . came under the umbrella of the Public Program of the 14th Istanbul Biennial with its overarching theme of “SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms.” The satellite programs on Kastellorizo were organized by the London-based Fiorucci Art Trust, which runs workshops, residencies, and artistled festivals often staged on remote islands (such as Stromboli, for the annual Volcano Extravaganza). A stimulating program of activities brought together local and international artists, curators, writers, arts patrons, and academics. They had been invited to respond to the chosen theme but also to the island setting, with its layered history, myths, archaeological vestiges, geological features, and natural wonders like the Blue Grotto on Kastellorizo. Spread over a week, the program unfolded in a relaxed and convivial atmosphere, leaving plenty of free time for individual forays, location scouting, field recordings, filming or photographing, and testing out ideas. The resulting artworks, performative lectures, and interventions were open to the local community and other visitors free of charge.

The multi-media works that made up The violent No!. . . curated by Fiorucci Art Trust’s artistic director Milovan Farronato appealed to all the senses, not just vision, and were presented at various, more or less spectacular indoor and outdoor locations on Kastellorizo.

Staged on the remote Dodecanese island of Kastellorizo, huddling the Turkish coast but far removed from the epicenter of the Istanbul Biennial, and Greek to boot, The violent No! of the sun burns the forehead of hills. Sand fleas arrive from salt lake and most of the theatres closeowed its somewhat unwieldy title to a stanza from poet and art critic Frank O’Hara’s “Ann Arbor Variations.” The poem was read out one evening by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to a small gathering of artists and guests of the Fiorucci Art Trust, whom the curator of the 14th Istanbul Biennial had “drafted in” to contribute to the public program with a series of interventions, readings, and activities responding to the genius lociand the biennial theme.

Fittingly, the weeklong course of action, conceived by Farronato in collaboration with Stella Bottai and Chiara Vecchiarelli, began with a boat trip to harvest salt, which can be found in abundance on the neighboring island of Rho. The handpicked salt brought back from Rho was used the following evening to season fried whitebait, a traditional Greek dish that Athens-based Dora Economou prepared and served at the open-air fish market. The symbolic fish fare, of which everyone could partake, attracted local people and visitors alike, including the Syrian refugees awaiting boats bound for Rhodes and Athens on the island. During the meal, Economou read from a personal travelogue mixing memories of places visited over the course of twenty years with enigmatic prophesies and recurrent images of erupting volcanoes. A visit to the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii prompts the narrator to liken a circle of beautiful and still women depicted in a wall painting to “Lot’s Wives turning into tears of salt”; she later weeps “rivers of salt.”

Salt was also present in Brazilian artist Lucia Koch’s synaesthetic intervention at the dilapidated hammamcurrently undergoing restoration work led by conservator Fotini Chalvantzi, who specializes in the history of Kastellorizo. Revisiting Turkish Delight(2003)—a site...