Lullabies as songs of rest; from the cradle to feminist labour struggles
Dismantling ideas around calculated time and productivity means creating a space in which
rest is possible and to postpone is an option. Westernized ideals valorize growth in terms of
expansion, power and brutality rather than viewing it as an effort to collectively grow and
create kinships of care. In a time when pain and trauma are re-established into the new
mental state, spaces of suspension seem to be an urgent requirement of our collective,
terrestrial body, while debris, waste and noise are gaining more space. In this workshop we
would propose new ways of decolonizing time structures by imagining a resting space,
similar to a cradle, through the use of the practice of signing lullabies. The lullaby as a
complex system of work and non-work, affection and labor, effort and rest, is a ubiquitous
yet elusive practice that could function as a “protective spell”, a new votive object-exercise
to exorcise colonization and the legacy of noise. In this effort we will first examine
traditional lullabies, analyzing them in relation to feminist struggles, ethnography and
semiotics while later on performing a making of our own. Through this creative
manipulation we will create contemporary struggle cradle songs, casting out our pain and
allowing space for our own needs to be heard while ultimately healing our individual and
collective body.
Eirini Vlavianou (b. 1994, Athens) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher. She is a
graduate student of the Visual Arts department of Francis Rich, School of Fine and
Performing Arts, a former student of Audiovisual Design at Willem de Kooning Academy and a current post-graduate student of Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins. Vlavianou is part of
the Room to Bloom community, a professor of Avtonomi Akadimia initiative and has worked
as an editor and research assistant at TTS, The Telos Society press. She has also participated
as an artist in various group exhibitions such as This is Not a Party at Trinity Buoy Wharf
London (2022), Pluriverse II organized by the Biennale of Western Balkans (2022), KI-
NIMATA art promenade organized by the Bouboulina museum (2021), Economy of Borders
at Tiergarten Berlin (2020) and Back to Athens 7 (2020) and as a lecturer and organizer in
symposiums of the public program of Documenta14 and Kyiv Biennial 2017. In 2022,
Vlavianou was one of the artists to receive a place in the Scientist in Residence: Making
Waves, a collaboration between UAL and the Tokyo Institute of Technology and in 2020, she
received the ARTWORKS award by Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Through this program, she
was offered the chance to collaborate with SNPHFI and the University of Thessaly in a
speculative zine publication as well as undertake seminars by the New Centre for Research
and Practice. She currently lives and works between Athens and Tinos, Greece.