Peeingwhilestanding E.T, 2020

[Kostis Damoulakis, Panagiotis Lianos, Jakob Traxlmayr, Pegy Zali, Adrien Angelopoulos, Dimitris Grigoropoulos and Vasilis Zacharakopoulos]

A bunch of part-time constructors, ex-bodybuilder champions, teachers, graffiti writers, painters, tattooers and architects, reside in a constant state of togetherness with the Other. Guys, who met on the Athenian streets and live in the queer landscape, in the cracks of legality and in a collective condition of unsettled and abnormal actions.

We shaped an environment, consisting of a writer’s bench, a sculpture, a mural, a rap track driven by A.I. generated lyrics and a 3d holographic rapper. These elements are collaboratively shaped by the ethics of underground cultures, habits and practices. The writer’s bench is constructed by scrap woods collected from Kypseli neighborhood, while the sculpture serves as a display for tools of their collective habits, habits that accompanied the creation of the mural during the last month. For the rap song, Nektarios Lianos, based on the latest academic developments in Machine Learning and Natural Language Understanding, trained a machine learning model to generate lyrics by providing it with female rappers songs suggested by Kostas Tereres. Finally, the lyrics were creatively curated by Syrakos Kesen and accompanied by music composed by Benjamin Seror, while the 3d animated rapper character performed them.

Peeingwhilestanding E.T, proposes a discourse emerging through the logic of emotions and the poetry of exclusion. The exhibition evades the dominant rationalized structures of “high cultural discourses'' considering gender, labor, nature, technology etc. and refuses to be recognized as an anti-hegemonic gesture, as it wishes to tear down the structures that create and sustain those dichotomies. The participants' collaboration, dynamically hidden in leaving ephemeral traces, creates forms through informal tactics and inappropriate procedures in the “periphery of the art system”.

P.E.T TREAT will be treated collectively by the participants plus Manos Venieris. The video clip for the rap song, followed by the fanzines created together with Orestis Pangalos, will be presented at P.E.T Projects on on the closing day of the exhibition wrapping up the lyrics with video material from the show. An after party will also take place where all the people involved at Peeingwhilestanding E.T and beyond it, will be DJing or/and VJing.