organized in collaboration with AthenSYN
“My name is Vilelmini Vilma Andrioti and I am a Greek political choreographer and sociologist. I was awarded an M(Res) in Choreography and Performance. I hope to offer you my experience and my thoughts as I consider my body as a vehicle to activism.
Let me tell you something about myself:
My father owned 2 boutiques and was a designer of clothing. My mother was a pharmacist. I was brought up being around their space. There was plenty of free time being along home, so they decided for me to take poetry lessons. This way I explored writing, storytelling, scenario creation.
Through the small factory of my father I practice designing clothes and setting up display windows. While through my mother’s pharmacy, because she often complained about traditional medicine, I was led to alternative therapies like reflexology, aromatherapy. I expanded into spiritual healing and meditation by going to Thailand and studying.
From my early childhood I was trained in classical ballet. At 17 teen I was diagnosed with epilepsy; in turn this illness wound up as a gift to me because it gave me strength to challenge my limits and explore every area of my body and mind. By this, I mean that I started trusting in myself, despite my occasional seizures and illness. I had confidence in dance as an art therapy and as an expression of my dreams my first choreographed piece was “Path of Dreams”.
Everything was connected to my art and blended together piece by piece as in a puzzle. The outcome of all these skills, designing the costumes writing the scenery and so on and so forth, was to create the company Periigites-Wonderers and performed internationally.
While I was practicing my art I found myself in the middle of the refugee crisis starting in the summer of 2015. I was sympathetic to this mass displacement of people because my family lost everything overnight in 1922, escaping Asia Minor as victims of war and became refugees.
I was a co-founder of the initiative “Refugees Welcome to Piraeus”. I established our facebook page with 9,500 members and was continuously coordinating all refugee activities:, arrange art, educational and cultural programs. I was hosting vulnerable families at my home, transporting patients to hospitals…
I see the body not only as bones and flesh but rather as an engine of free spirit which is socially and politically important for the benefit of the community.
During this talk, I will share my experience of involving refugees in No Mirror performance, in which refugees showed their aesthetical ideals. In this play we created costumes from scrap materials found in the refugee camps. This play gave them an opportunity to tell their stories. Also the revenue from ticket sales went to the refugees to support their needs. The story of this project contains very dark elements. During the rehearsals my accounts were hacked, there were threats and harassment by the police, just to mention some of the experiences.
My next work, Bordello of Borders, is a logical continuation of the exploitation of refugees. I explore some of the dangers facing these vulnerable people: organ harvesting and children trade, sexual and gender based violence. Let’s address vulnerability, resistance and precariousness. Superiority produces conflicts. Precariousness leads to violence. Domination gives the idea of the savior and the saved. Charity and solidarity do not dismantle the inequality mechanisms of war which in turn reinforce the refugee crisis. Victims become material for exploitation, continuing the vicious cycle. The government sells the wrapping of volunteerism in order to challenge the limits of humanity and fill the void of the lack of policy.”