The action as described by professor and panelist Eleana Yalouri: ‘The performance began with a certain Mr. Misouridis, who invaded the space of the Archaeological Dialogues conference and interrupted the flow of the roundtable by demanding to make an urgent announcement on behalf of the General Directorate of Antiquities. Amid staged and unstaged reactions and complaints from members of the audience, Misouridis managed to get a hearing. In his announcement, he adopted the official, heroic discourse, both in terms of form and content, about archaeological finds in the controversial excavation of Amphipolis, and he presented some allegedly ‘recent finds’ from the (fictitious) site of Klidonia, Konitsa, near Amphipolis. His intervention aroused public and private critical or even angry comments and discussions about the role of the Directorate of Archaeology in Greece and its official discourse, as well as the politics in which it is involved.

By drawing on and reproducing discourses from archaeological and other official press-releases, Stafylakis’ performance injected the official discourse of the Greek state into a conference that otherwise problematized that discourse and exposed it through mimesis. By acting like a trickster, who transgresses social rules and unsettles established borders, Stafylakis held up a mirror to the Greeks’ relationship with their “difficult” classical heritage and archaeological institutions and commented on them in a more powerful way than any analysis could have done. He created an event that not only broke the regularity/canonicity of the round-table discussion, but concurrently opened up possibilities of connection and a conceptual transition from the archaeological and anthropological discourse and practice presented in the first part of the round-table to the artistic discourse and practice of the second part.’

Click to read Yalouri’s full essay:

http://field-journal.com/issue-11/the-return-of-the-unreal?fbclid=IwAR31HA1esu-dv4fQI9fGqX33t1reoWD8VpfMbtD6q15tqqO4YKOSgjUa7SE