Kantharos Gatherings is a series of artistic wine experiences intertwining with Dexamenes Seaside Hotelâs original story as a century-old wine factory turned into a barefoot luxury resort. On June 29 and on July 13, resident artists Panos Profitis and Despina Charitonidi presented âSpitâ, a carnal wine tasting performance relating to the body and oscillating between the individual and the collective.
The wine tasting process is enhanced with handcrafted clay spittoons, each of whom is different than the other, yet imagined as part of a coherent whole. These spittoons carry figurative and abstract forms, migrated from an expanded iconography relating to wine, the primitive past, the organic world, and the industrial heritage. These other-worldly receptacles solemnize the trivial, sometimes embarrassing, action of spitting or dumping the wine.
Throughout the performance, Panos Profitis and Despina Charitonidi use their bodies either as a unity or in a binary, complementary way. Their movements, anchored in stillness, balance or endurance, and complimented by GHONEâs soundscapes, form delicate, sometimes playful, tableaux-vivants set against the metal carapace of the hotelâs signature tanks.
The flux of the event goes full circle with the servers, going in and out of the tank, wearing laser-cut, metal green costumes that resemble the exoskeleton of a beetle, which was the bug that the ancient wine cup kantharos borrows its name from. Along with the wine bottles, the servers bear objects with loose associations to the four wine labels served from the Brintziki, Mercouri, Stavropoulos, and Markogianni Estates.
In the end, togetherness is celebrated. What once used to be oneâs own, is collected and fused, in order to become part of a larger, structural whole, where wine, water, and body fluids unite. What was excreted by the body (spit), or by oneâs glass (wine), becomes a component of a communal fountain/body.
Conceptualized & organized by Eleni Tranouli
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