The symphony of disharmony

1 film projection, 1 piano, 1 violin, 1 drum, 1 glockenspiel with stand, 1 nosemaker, 1 conductor baton, 1 knife, 2 butcher knives, 2 hammers, 2 axes, 1 piano stool, 4 chairs, 5 musical analogues, 6 drawings.

Stills from Film, single channel, sound, duration 5min 01sec, resolution HD 1920 1080

Synopsis:

In psychology, and particularly in the field of psychoanalysis in the vocabulary of Laplance & Pontalis, the Freudian conceptualization of the death drive (Todestrieb) is defined as the opposite instinct that opposes the life drive and has a tendency to return living creatures into the inanimate state. It is primarily oriented inwards and tends to self-destruction and secondarily outwards and is expressed as an aggressive or destructive drive. According to Jacques Lacan, the drive is unbounded, repetitive and ultimately destructive, and therefore every drive is a death drive. According to Jouissance, the drive is satisfied when it fails to achieve its goal, when it repeats this failure. The endless circulation around the object generates its satisfaction.

The work “The symphony of disharmony” has key influences-references, on the one hand, to the field of psychology and the views on the death drive and, in the other hand, to the work of the playwright Samuel Beckett.

The purpose of the play is to highlight the paradox of drive as an unconscious impulse of internal violence and self-destruction, as a tendency of self-handicapping, uncontrollable and irreversible. In the video, the clowns of an orchestra playing music in an unconventional way, creating a condition influenced by Fluxus practices, play on the brink between harmony and disharmony trying to make a reduction or a parallelism, among bipolar relationships between conscious and unconscious, psychological balance and paranoia, totality and fragmentation, life and death.

Concept / Director:

Vasilis Karvounis

Performers:

Conductor - Ioannis Papachristou

Piano - Maria Foudoulaki

Violin - Linardos Kirilias

Glockenspiel - Ioannis Tzaneteas

Drum - Hilda Xhafa

Noise maker - Maria Papadopoulou

With the support:

Theater - Athens School of Fine Arts