After Embros: 12 Thoughts on the rise and fall of performance practices on the periphery of Europe

On the 11th November 2011, Mavili Collective – a group of artists and theatre makers – occupied the disused theatre building of Embros, in Athens, Greece. The occupancy installed itself as a “re-activation” and proposed an intense twelve-day programme of activities bringing together artists, theoreticians, dance/theatre makers, architects and the general public. The activities were devised out of the “current lacks and shortfalls of our system” and attempted “to interrogate the global changing landscape at this moment in time” as Mavili Collective stated in the opening document. Due to the precarity of the political and cultural situation and its non-hierarchical modes of working Embros Occupancy produced an alternative circuit in the local cultural market; a questioning of the “modi operandi” of the cultural sector, and a questioning of the cultural imagination - of what culture is and what it can do today.

This paper operates as a diary of the twelve-day occupancy in Embros and a mapping of the cultural landscape of Greece. Through a reading of Embros re-activation as an incomplete cultural proposal this paper will attempt to bring together the possibilities and impossibilities of the periphery in order examine the role of the contemporary flexible worker. Consideration will be given to the potential of the seemingly ephemeral practices of the precariat to produce new alternatives, imperceptible moments of social activity that bear the potential to become the starting point for re-formation and re-evaluation.