Optimistic Manifest

Optimistic Manifest Since Flying In my mind we are still flying‌

Guerrilla Optimists-Selected Actions 2012-2017

[1]

[2]

1 How can we poetically begin? Do poetic activities and even dreams change the consciousness of social space? In the name of optimism we attempt public somniferous acts... Participants take turns facilitating sleep for their partner and planting the suggestion of flying into their partner’s dreams. The question: can a collective nurture one another so that in spite of depression, crisis, aggression, uncertainty, our consciousness can fly in our dreams? If we can do this for one another, in a public place, will the place be affected? Will our collective potential be strengthened? What good does flying in our dreams do, when we can barely subsist in our waking lives? Our faith is that dreams create spaces for understanding our lives. Learning to fly is a form of psychic empowerment we practice by night. In the day we dream and act more playfully. We require this strength in the face of obstacles and ugliness.

2 Creating the Future of Flying: Our flight training slumber actions are self-made rehearsal centers with sleeping bags and hot milk in rooms and open spaces for take off. With units of pressure increasing in the crisis in Athens, dream rates are increasing, the aviation industry expanding, and the demand for qualified flying personnel has never been greater. Today, there are many challenging careers

available in the Earth’s interior, flying the atmosphere, troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and even aerospace. These complex operations require many skilled dreamers, and offer a wide variety of flight opportunities.

Those that want to join know that endless possibilities lie ahead.

Our School, Flight Guerrilla Optimists, helps dreamers prepare for complex take offs by inducing key flight abilities- through a bottom up sleep approach from any space, and include spinning in case of dream loss. We confront unexpected blocked states through the creation of tolerant ambiances for personal contact and friendship.

3 We are the Guerrilla Optimists! We act on absurd and tricky maneuvers in public spaces as interventions with sounds, lungs, bells, flutes, poetry, letters to Ministers, and even with our dreams. These acts are our reaction to political maladies, against degradation of transitional public spaces, against predominant ideologies, against violent economic orders, against violent political orders, against violent social orders. They are acts of healing; acts of giving a voice; acts of leaving small marks in the air.

4 An archive is a deliberate calculated collection of lost memories. Collective memories are in greater complexity and variety than Individual once. Lost and found memory can reveal hidden ways for celebration of collective past.

The memory of our past selves and the future of optimism lay in the awareness of our actions, knowledge and feelings. Here we have organized a simple flight timeline of our actions together. By using fragments from our press releases, from poetic announcements and a few yearly notes, to create this Optimistic Manifest Since Flying.

5 In 2012 we began with an idea: to attempt to fly together in each other’s sleep, while sleeping indoors, as a group. As result of our sleeping workshops, we became close and formed a stronger feeling of a group even though our understanding was of en ephemeral members and actions. We created sound recordings from our time while asleep and refer to these as dreamsessions.

We began to question how much we have been influenced by consumerism ideas about making sense of comfort in our lives, about where one sleeps. Some of us kept daily written reports of our dreams, exchanged via-e-mail, for one year.

Not everyone could keep up with this everyday routine. In the dreams, we read questions about how much daily Athenian life -- the violence, the media, and the riots -- have taken control over the contents of our dreams.

6 ‘Acts of Public Dreaming 2013’ was featured at the San Francisco De Young Museum, for the Social Dream Lab, by Natalie Zimmerman and Michel Wilson.

We uploaded the dreams and sounds from our slumber parties onto the Social Dream Lab blog in a time-based manner, as we progressed with our daily dream

reports and collective sleeping and included manifestos and dream fragments from the one-year ongoing dream exchange between Optimists, as well as audible documentation from the sleeping workshops [1].

7 It made sense to begin thinking of sleeping as a public act of collective unconsciousness and, as a group, we moved from indoor sleeping workshops to attempt sleeping in public outdoors in Omonia Square*. When we arrived at Omonia Square, we discovered that the Square was neglected; its inhabitants: drug dealers, undocumented immigrants, homeless people, migrants had nowhere to go and gypsy children played on the vents of the metro station. We kept reports of the encounters with the inhabitants, dream logs and aspirations in our lived experiences, with the environment at the square. A place considered to be dangerous by the native communities; a place built from cement, surrounded by cars; a place adorned with fermented fountains and city dust; the sounds of vents, children, cars, bicycles, horns, washing trucks and passersby, asking us questions, sometimes sitting near us...

8 Dreaming in Athens: We prepare ourselves with private acts that we share within our small group. We write daily dream logs and sleep at each others’ housescreating a sense of collectivity among relative strangers from different backgrounds. This is our first political act. But our project is intended to confront a pivotal public location- the troubled and infamous Omonia Square in the center of Athens. From our experiences we create collective dream texts, soundscapes, maps, images, and plans for action in our waking lives. The newspapers declare that Greece is in crisis. This crisis is the result of a spiritual corruption that permeates the entire capitalist stratosphere, but for reasons both strategic and irrational, Greece has been pinned as the weak link endangering the civilized world. Guerrilla Optimists wonder if the signs of a healthy economy are not also evidence of a shameful blindness? For the last year, in an attempt to see, we’ve been closing our eyes to dream in the center of Athens. We propose that the invisible web of dreams alters reality- just as reality is often a dream.

In the heart of Athens, now ‘destroyed,’ we feel a different pulse than the one in the media. Our desire to dream collectively and publicly is a methodology to direct attention to the positive, to gather our own compromised strength, and to participate in the growth of a consciousness we witness in the humane, and proud people we meet.

Even in Omonia Square*, despite material and social afflictions, despite addictions, and despair, we see purity in those who find refuge there, and we approach them as teachers. Together we dream of flying... We cultivate lucid states to both recognize and intervene in the collective unconscious. It is possible to re- dream the square- its form and use. We create actions, with the logic of the dream, that foster temporary communities and sometimes new spaces of belonging. Our work must be both literal and symbolic, absurd and extremely practical, in our efforts to touch, transform and communicate what we experience in ‘destroyed’ Athens.

Let us lay down together, our bodies on the forgotten grounds of our own cities, and let our dreams intermingle. We believe our proposal to be a more plausible idea than the proposition that capitalism will protect the environment, or create global social justice. So we propose, as Guerrilla Optimists, that if we fly together in our dreams we will change the world. * Omonia (meaning concord) Square in Athens is an important center of the old city around which daily markets, immigrants, and drug addiction all gather. It used to be a center of tourism but now it is a center of despair.

9 Call to Action: We are inviting all interested in producing experimental sounds with objects and their bodies to explore and recalibrate the harmonics of Omonia Square. This is a call to wild creatures, drummers, musicology students, people experimenting with their bodies, scratching, yawning, and breathing… This is also a call to serious listeners and samplers of silence.

Omonia’s qi energy has been blocked and the health of the square is compromised. Between the roaring pulse of peripheral traffic and the quiet neglect of the center, let us join voices, slap thighs, bang sticks, ring bells.

Through the expression of our sounds, and the vibrations of our hearts, we may revitalize ourselves and the square. This call is initiated by the Guerrilla Optimists - a spontaneous formation of people sharing the idea to dream together and fly in our sleep in overlooked spaces. As part of our research on dreams and public dreaming in Athens, we intermingle with the psychic energy of Omonia Square.

We have slept there on various occasions and dreamt, talked to passers by and involved them in our actions, in order to tap into the unconscious fields of the space.

10 In September 2013, In a small triangular formation, we began ringing bells, in irregular routines, as a way of changing the psychoacoustics of the square, and as an act of healing for our own sakes. All the materials created up to that point were actions in communal settings and public outdoor spaces, some of which have culminated in exhibitions. The last page of our Dreamers’ Handbook [2] contains a report of one day of ringing bells at Omonia Square.

Here is a tiny report from Cathryn Drake, who passed by Omonia Square and heard us ringing…

11 One Year of Sleeping and Ringing Bells in Public at Omonia Square- ‘Public Acts of Dreaming’ 2013 is an installation piece involving a bell, ‘The Dreamers’ Handbook’ and the newspaper titled ‘Guerrilla Optimists: Times for Unacknowledged Sentience 2013’ shown at the Bozar, Brussels’ exhibition ‘No Country for Young Men - Contemporary Greek Art in Times of Crisis 2013’, curated

by Katerina Gregos and supported by Outset. The book is re-assemblage of our written daily dreams and dreamscapes. The newspaper has gathered our reports and actions in the city of Athens since 2004.

12 Our newspaper Declares Greece is in Crisis! The Newspaper titled ‘Guerrilla Optimists: Times for Unacknowledged Sentience 2013 was created towards the end of our ‘Public Acts of Dreaming at Omonia Square 2013’. It was also shown at Linder Project Space ‘Human/ Not Human/ Superhuman – The Body in Performance and Intervention’ in Berlin, curated by An Paenhuysen, in a more informal setting, passed around between people attending the exhibition. Since then, a few copies of the newspaper have traveled with our friends to their friends, as well as for another occasion, in an exhibition called ‘Overseas’ at the ACG Art Gallery, curated by Galina Notti. On March 2016, the newspaper debuted on-air at the Extraterrestrial Radio - Give Me Radio! for the Meta.Morph - Nice to Be in Orbit! - Biennale for art and technology. It was designed with our optimistic spirit: people having the right to create their own news and tell their stories. There are repressed scenarios that individuals should voice in public spaces, which have no chance of making it to the news.The news media have created another reality- a superficial one that serves corruption, politicians and their power, and does not concern itself with simple people’s experiences.

Our news announces tactical maneuvers and interventions in open public spaces. They are bits of a whole landscape of stories of people, all over Europe, perhaps in the world, experiencing broken situations and forces of societal pressure. Our view is that there are not enough ways or places to process those.

No recycling of what our society creates, which haunts us in our living lives.

We try to intervene and bring our optimism that alternate realities exist.

13 2015- We continued to confront the crisis that our society has delivered in different invisible and pivotal locations in the city. We moved from Omonia to Syntagma Square when locked down by police during the riots when the city stopped functioning. The city needed lungs. We lined up at Syntagma Square and begin with our bodies breathing.

14 2015-Blowing Actions sent to The Box, Los Angeles: During months of protest ending suddenly with a “bailout” agreement sentencing Greece to slow death, we gather publicly in Syntagma Square and face the Parliament building – not to make speeches or add to the cacophony of words – but as an act of buoyancy against political despair. Flutes, horns and toys! Through the tumult of the international news, and the endless futile negotiations, we blow out our breath with all our strength. Just a few small bodies, marking the air with evidence that we exist. Droning sounds, with neither harmony nor dissonance, without themes and counterpoints, just sound and the cessation of breath.

15 When: Friday 18th, 18:00-19:00; Guerrilla Optimists breathe deeply. Please join!

‘Breathing session with the Guerrilla Optimists ‘: loud mouth exhalations and gentle soundings from different points converging the sound in one

common space - a country where fresh air seems impossible to respire, literary recover hope, courage, or strength after a time of difficulty, newly respiring from so long a war, carry out respiration, especially at night when photosynthesis has ceased. The collaborators are: Alexandros Georgiou form India, Jennifer Nelson and Natalia Papadopoulou from Athens, Greece, Rosina Ivanova with Susanna Barlow and Yanir Shani from Trondheim, Norway, and breathing sound compiles and mixed by Manos Tsatiris [3].

16 On October 5th 2016- Benaki Museum’s ‘Out-Topias/Outdoor Public Space Actions’ exhibition, curated by Thanos Vovolis. Since 2015, we have experimented with acts of communal breathing and the blowing of air in open public spaces. Our action titled ‘Resistance Blowing in Syntagma: flute, horns and doudoukia’ involved blowing into broken toys, flutes and horns at Syntagma Square, while facing the Greek Parliament, daily, for a duration of one week.

Parallel to this, in October 2016, we began a workshop in blowing instruments, percussion and voice, which involved residents living in the Nestor 1st Psychogeriatric boarding home in Athens, Greece via the borders Project with the help of the curator Marina Tsekou at the National Museum for Contemporary Art, EMST. The workshop in the Nestor facility took place over two days in October, and was open-ended. Our aim in both actions was to form a temporary community and, through the act of blowing, to collectively make this moment audible. This action was previously done in 2015 over the period of January to June, as an immediate reaction to the austerity measures in Greece and as a non-violent protest. Videos of blowing in public spaces were played at The Box Gallery in Los Angeles, curated by Marra McCarthy, where the daily-created video files were deleted upon being played once.

17 Call to Action: Blowing doudoukia at Syntagma Square, October 2016 This October 13-19th we will blow air in flute, horns and doudoukia at Syntagma Square, daily between 18:00-19:00. We invite willing participants to bring their own horns and join us for resistance blowing. With no infrastructure, we form a community for ourselves to blow air into whatever objects we find.Within the backgrounds of political concord and the city-repressed multiculturalism, we stamp impressions of our bodies, blowing with all our strength, for passersby.

An anachronistic scenario, we feel the results of political, communal and economic degradation that the city is experiencing deeply within our bodies; with the city our bodies experience too. We mourn, but we also attempt to view this act as an act of celebration through our bodies, and small moments of freedom. We blow, consciously changing one another, while the city affects our families and us. Can we affect the city? Blowing takes different shapes and manifest as lachrymose, a calming practice, as shaking, as breathing, as clowning, as buffoonery frustration...Through this act, we withstand our inevitable erasure from the Square, we amplify our sense of distress. We intervene not only in our surroundings. Standing, blowing, we try to find personal ways out of economic, political and bodily crisis. We oppose the multiple forms of our own governing

and restraining forces, starting within our own bodies. We blow against that very building as a way to change ourselves. Breaking down the little governments within us.

18 2017- ‘Hope Signals from Athens’ -The Guerrilla Optimists share through a live stream the sounds of their explorations from Athens, Greece, to Trondheim, Norway. We will walk in the center of Athens ringing bells and blowing horns, through the suffering streets and neighborhoods of Athens, finding moments of hope and community. We will ring bells and blow hors with the people we meet along the way. Our actions are acts of resistance through their defiance of aggression and belief in hope. We send signals of tenderness, gentleness and activate our bodies in public open spaces. We do not overthrow governments, we activate and we heal one another. We want to move these poetic sounds to Norway as a call for awareness. It is our call to attention to a global condition- how energy flows in the form of money, something that causes a lot of pain. Even if not visible, our breath and energy are the imprint of something left behind which does impact the space. For this project we plan to place a speaker on the façade of Danske Bank building at Solsiden together with the poster describing our action and broadcast the sounds from Athens to Trondheim.

19 Guerrilla Optimists are a fluid collection of individuals who engage in ephemeral actions in the city of Athens. Guerrilla Optimists are of multiple minds, but agreed in their enthusiasm to speak out, with absurd and poetic maneuvering as an artistic strategy for moral survival. While self-proclaimed optimists currently work together in Athens, there are surely others working in other parts of the world. Assorted collaborators over 10 years: C. Amalia Charikiopoulou, Alexandros Georgiou, Rosina Ivanova, Konate Mamadou, Soulis Moustakidis, Jennifer Nelson, Natalia Papadopoulou, Toby Short, Manos Tsatiris, Théophile Yerbanga.

20 Actually let us decide now, collectively, for our future!

1. A. thinks Guerrilla Optimism is over.

2. Guerrilla Optimism was born in reaction to and is linked specifically to Athens.

In so far as what happens in Athens is a global phenomenon, actions in other sites could be considered part of Guerrilla Optimism, but with Athens as a referent.

3. Guerrilla Optimisms is A and me, and will always also be T, and now is also strongly R, and then all those who join and leave. But since A is leaving, T is gone, R has left, its over (see 1.)

4. Guerrilla Optimists is a totally meaningless and therefore open term, with a loose set of working principles, subject to change, and anyone anywhere can take up the name and leave it as they see fit.

5. Guerrilla Optimists is Natalia. She is the future.

6. Guerrilla Optimists is a form of temporary community, currently shared by the four of us and our guests, but is open to change and may eventually continue without any of us.

7. Guerrilla Optimism is only a set of working principles and we are just of service to them 8. Other

[1] Strategy: Omonia Square, From Athens Greece, for DreamLab, Social Satisfaction.org [2] The Dreamers’s Handbook [3] Breathing sessions with S, Y and R for the Guerrilla Optimists Global Breathing Event for the Extraterrestrial Radio [4] Blowing at Syntagma, October 15, 2016-excerpt [5] Greeting Excerpt from the workshop at Nestor 1st Psychogeriartric Home for elderly people, Athens, Greece

[3]

[4]

Image: Rosina Ivanova Design: Rosina Ivanova, Joana Bruno Editors: Jennifer Nelson, Alexandros Georgiou, Karoline Künzle Print: SMØR Press Edition: 50 Published by: Guerrilla Optimists

[5]