Yianni Mitrou’s art tries to penetrate the deepest meanings of existence.
Yiannis Mitrou
Looking for boundaries and connections
Text: Marni Hatziemmanouil
The performing art of Yannis Mitrou unearths the innermost thoughts, the ancestral features of liberties, hangups, politics, protest, coexistence, meaning, drama, life itself, giving rise to the ideal and urging us to overcome any border. We are traveling across an authentic experience, through performance art, which, as he argues, “took on such dimensions in contemporary art as it relies on something profoundly fundamental, the performative quality of mankind.”
PhD holder in Philosophy, visual performance artist, director and researcher in the field of Media Philosophy with relation to Psychoanalysis, founder and Director of the Laboratory of Research and Performing Arts “Alma Kalma”, Yannis Mitrou is working as an artist and a researcher in Greece and abroad, presenting his exceptional compositions to the audience. “The performative phenomenon can be combined both with the ritual phenomenon and every kind of performative form. The connection with visual art starts from the artists’ need, in the early 20th century, to rediscover the living body, intertwining in a multifaceted and multiform way art with space and life.”
A graduate of AUTh’s School of Physics and a fellow at the Institute of Nuclear Fusion at Orsay, Paris-Sud for original scientific research, he conducted his PhD thesis on “Phenomenology of the unconscious: The example of the Lacanic field”, as part of a collaboration between AUTh’s School of Philosophy and Education with Paris VIII’s Department of Psychoanalysis. He has so far teamed up with the Jerzy Grotowski Institute, Wrocław, Poland, the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, Pontedera, Italy, the Department of Performing Experimental Arts of Moscow’s Art Academy, the art venue Art Klub, New Orleans, USA etc.
His research is focused on the relation between art and science. “The transformation of certain rituals into a spectacle may come as a necessity through social crises, constituting a regulatory factor in the way it was handled at times by traditional societies. Following in the footsteps of Turner, the ritual is born in order for the crisis to be accepted or, through a series of elaborations, to give way to the new that will eradicate or socially integrate the element that triggers the crisis. Grotowski trains his performers, creating a performing structure that aims at the development and the broadening of conscience, as well as of a different perception, through a kind of exercise with artistic traits. It encompasses the aesthetic element, which, according to Grotowski’s view, needs to be transformed into hype/aesthetic, in other words to come into contact with any human being, regardless of their social and cultural references, and generate vibrations.”
Keeping the flame of creation unquenched, Yannis Mitrou worked as professor for many years at AUTh’s Faculty of Fine Arts and the post-graduate programme “Art and Public Sphere”, and will be teaching at the new interdepartmental post-graduate programme (Athens School of Fine Arts-National & Kapodistrian University of Athens) titled “The Sacred and Art”. Awarded by the Grotowski Institute, he has left his personal mark on the pioneering method “Biodynamics & Principle of Least Action”, which binds together the traditional Eastern theater techniques with the contemporary performing arts. and conducts post-graduate and doctoral theses in Greece and abroad, revolving around his mode of research and methodology on performing arts with relation to psychoanalysis and philosophy. “I got involved with theater as an actor and as a director through my obsession to create tableaux-vivants. The visual element fuels me with content, illustrating emotions and conditions while offering the audience the chance to take delight in an intricate and multiform spectacle through visual art.”
The connection with visual art starts from the artists’ need, in the early 20th century, to rediscover the living body, intertwining in a multifaceted and multiform way art with space and life. Performance art took on such dimensions in contemporary art as it relies on something profoundly fundamental, the performative quality of mankind.
His activities as an artist are showcased in grand venues both in Greece and abroad, which “serve as a main installation, such as museums, galleries, monuments.” His choreography and chorography
approach is based on his bio-dynamic method, which he has been developing since 2009, of “body crinkles”, and the relation they produce in space alongside the objects and other performative forms, such as multimedia and other installations. “It constitutes a whole, materialized inter-corporally and inter-medially through the “fusion” of several events entailed in the overall performance and the use of media,” he explains.
Yannis Mitrou’s art alludes to sculpture, and namely in the study of bodies in the Renaissance era, the Russian avant-garde, and namely in the the relation of visual installation with the body as a in-motion work according to Meyerhold’s biomechanics method, as well as the research of the reviser and thinker of the performing arts, Jerzy Grotowski, an Arte Povera practitioner and inspirer of the “art as vehicle” approach. “My study on the Russian avant-garde pertains to the evolution and shaping of another body condition in an overall subversive theater. It was Meyerhold’s theater, whose formalistic pattern, rhythmic speech and visual art approach, always in correlation with the physicality of the actors, opened up my perception of theater. On the other hand, the new language’s universe, stretched out all the way to Malevich’s ontology, reconfigured in every level my relation to a notion of “living” art, which could no longer be classified, but would allow a bending of its limits with regard to their medium and language.”
His stance that patriarchal perception of knowledge and the quasi identification of the latter with the amalgam of information led him to other forms of constitution of his cognitive field, with intentionality towards learning as a performance of discourse. “A performativity that becomes performance, starting from the untrained and the vague of general “gestures”, physically enriched by artists inscribed in the visual art area. Then, we make the transition to the “language” of the performer, of the mimes and agents in the various folklore traditions, whose intentionality shifts not towards the aesthetic but the societal.”
His monograph titled Performance art: unconscious, body, performative act is an original scientific research that interweaves the phenomenon of art and psychoanalysis as the assumption of a new media aesthetics through a phenomenological approach. His second monograph titled Phenomenology and aesthetics of the media and physicality in the digital era is the first book in the philosophy of media with a phenomenological approach and a Lacanic direction.
His collaboration with the state-owned television broadcaster of ERT3 in 2017, within a series of cultural TV shows, aimed at highlighting the active relation between art and reality in cultural, social and aesthetic level, but also the investigation of the eternal human necessity to produce culture. The idea of using mass media, such as television, to diffuse certain notions and bring forth a scientific positioning was carried out through fourteen half-hour shows on the art movements of the 20th century. The Black Square discusses the political and the aesthetic, intersecting philosophy and psychoanalysis concepts, with an interdisciplinary and interartistic approach. The idea, the role of the editor-in-chief, the scientific supervision of the research and the hosting of the show were my tasks. The endeavor included the use of other media as well, such as animation, video art, live actions etc., thus creating a landscape of speech and images targeted toward elucidating concepts and the multifarious transmission of historical information. In fact, the show provided an answer to the question whether an art TV show of philosophical and interdisciplinary context could reach out to a broader audience and illustrate hard-to-grasp concepts.
Yannis Mitrou has curated 14 exhibitions in galleries, museums and other art venues, has founded new institutions such as the International Forum for Performance art (IFPA), a parallel and autonomous section of the Drama International Short Film Festival. IFPA’s thematology covers a wide spectrum of arts, placing emphasis on physicality and intermediality, screening video performance-digital performance and visual art films from all over the world, and showcasing a theoretical branch that has become a vital part of the festival, endowed with a scientific character.
