Zoi Dimitriou Company, Peregrinus

Zoi Dimitriou Company, Peregrinus, Firkin Crane, Cork, July 20

Zoi Dimitriou in Peregrinus (photo: Nicholas Minns)

Zoi Dimitriou’s Peregrinus began as research into the notion of peregrination or pilgrimage on a residence at Firkin Crane in 2015 as part of the Blank Canvas Residency programme. While forming the work for this year’s Fast Forward Festival 4 by the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens, which also produced the work, the refugee crisis in Europe overlaid her notion of peregrination with the political, psychological and physical effects of displacement. As Frédéric Gros wrote in his A Philosophy of Walking, peregrination and displacement are joined at the root: “The primary meaning of peregrinus is foreigner or exile. The pilgrim, originally, is not one who is heading somewhere (Rome, Jerusalem, etc.), but essentially one who is not at home where he is walking.” Greece is one of the entry points for refugees who risk their lives to flee conflict zones in North Africa and the Middle East to find a new life in Europe. The official welcome policy is one of containment in refugee camps that offer exiles a level of safety while they await a political solution to their humanitarian crisis, and because these camps are outside the urban centres, the condition and fate of refugees is often only revealed through media sources. It is this mediatized relationship to refugees that Dimitriou took as the starting point of Peregrinus.

The work references the current refugee crisis through recorded stories of people Dimitriou interviewed in London and Athens who had in the past experienced forced displacement as a result of violent conflict but who are now settled in their host countries. She and her artistic team then chose as her location a run-down, disused warehouse that was part of the anonymous, industrial infrastructure of Athens and restricted the number of audience members to the capacity of a blacked-out mini-bus that transported them from the Onassis Cultural Centre (OCC) to the warehouse. The journey took just under 24 minutes, the time it took for the passengers to hear in the darkness the stories Dimitriou had recorded. Nobody knew where they were going and not even the locals recognised the destination once they arrived; the journey was designed to echo the sense of displacement in the stories. Inside the warehouse was a structure resembling a church nave and transepts with three-metre-high translucent panels for walls and a lightbox for a roof that limited the lighting principally to the interior of the structure but let it spill out through the panels. The audience remains outside looking in at Dimitriou who remains unaware of our gaze, moving in abstracted steps and gestures like time-lapse images of walking, crawling, prayer, rage, despair, resolve and stoic determination. There is a very real sense that despite her approaching the edges of the walls she is never coming out.

The translucent panels have internal baffles that are slightly angled to the line of vision: look one way through them and it is impossible to see beyond, but look the other way or straight on and you can perceive the figure beyond. If you maintain a fixed perspective (as in watching a television screen) Dimitriou moves in and out of your field of vision; you have to follow her to keep her in focus. The structure represents a medium through which we see refugees, and yet behind the screen the pacing and the daily concerns and the personal tragedies continue unheard and unheeded. By inserting herself into this mirage of displacement, Dimitriou channels empathy for the refugees and allows the audience the space to come to their own conclusions. She moves silently to a subdued industrial score — at one point a cross between turning helicopter blades and a swift, rhythmic saw — and the only overt messages are in stenciled, illuminated signs on the walls and floor of the warehouse: ‘You Are Here’, ‘You Are Involved’, ‘Utopia is Closing Down’, to which are added stark signs like ‘No Man’s Land’, ‘Foreigners This Way Please’ and ‘No Congregation In this Area’. Apart from these contextual signs there is nothing to suggest a refugee camp; Dimitriou is using the distance and abstraction of the theatrical presentation to give the audience the opportunity to focus on her references to the current social and political reality. Peregrinus thus reflects on and interferes with our western sense of carefully mediatized detachment from the crisis. To make this work effectively, the setting up of the experience is as important as the performance itself; it requires a unity of intention in the same way a politically united response to the refugee question is the only way to resolve it.

A country that through geographical fate finds itself hosting refugees might well be said to have a problem it has agreed to for humanitarian reasons but doesn’t quite know how to deal with. By an inadvertent twist of fate, Firkin Crane as host found itself in a similar role; having invited Dimitriou to perform and having received the translucent structure from OCC and set it up — with modifications — in the theatre’s auditorium, the host left the details of the production in limbo. While Dimitriou had the space in which to perform, the logistics of the production did not successfully contextualize the refugee experience for the audience. The theatre itself, despite its history as a workshop for the manufacture of butter firkins, is too laden with the implications of entertainment and leisure to destabilise an audience and the curtained mini-bus journey started in plain daylight outside the front of the theatre and arrived 25 minutes later at the stage door, mimicking the original idea but leaving little incentive for the passengers to subjectivise the experience. What remained was Dimitriou’s performance in which the notion of peregrination and exile survived in its original spirit despite a host that wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it. Art imitating life.