“There will not be any depths of despair to worry about from the reflection by which we will go find the tragedy of those mothers; those mothers are called the will, the illusion, the pain” ( quote from a projected study on the tragedy and free spirits. Nietzsche, September 1870).

The concept of Blue Pigs, stemming from Marina Olympios’ research and experiments seems to emerge like a tenacious and stubborn attack on existence. The body is power, it resists anything that would strive to weaken or destroy it. Blue Pigs is an anxiety filled and painful dream, an extreme. Is it really a dream? It reveals itself, first, as an attitude towards the body, to what affects it; the ferocity and constancy of the hatred, despair, suffering, hysteria, furious invectives. Blue Pigs is the always-precarious victory, the stylized form of a verbal art, prey to strange deliriums, back to a quasi-animal natural state. Even better, Blue Pigs does not contain the echoes and essential form of spontaneous imaginary Greek drama!

Marina Olympios, accompanied by choreographer Maria Hassabi, and artist Katerina Kana form a ranting choir, fictitious natural beings, convulsive beauty stricken by a broken and morbid humanity. Clothed in an ethereal white suit, face splattered with blue, rigged with snout, hair dressed with wigs or oversized headdresses, they draw from occult and clever forces, moves and behaviours, miming the pathetic gesticulation of dislocation and distraction limits of a life.

In ancient tragedy, the soot-smeared characters, whether from minium or vegetable juices, took part in the drama cradle, executing moves, at times singular, amidst the exhilaration of sounds and the contagion of rhythms. This cult of irrational, vital energy, is transplanted at the heart of our contemporary troubles taking a teeming mythology by storm, with rituals that bring cosmogony up to date. With its parody, Blue Pigs imitates drama, delivers to us the lamentation of suffering heroes stuck in daily threats: wreck, disintegration, death.

This creative yet troubling form supports a certain familiarity with the absurd, the superfluous, with such close, scattered, and hidden death in the symbols of life. This experience is experienced like an integral work of art that redistributes the relationship between artist, public, and art in an unprecedented way, in a fusion of the vision. This notion in relation to the public had already been developed in the “Let Me Be Your Guide” exhibitions at Renos Xippas in Paris, or, Le repas, les philosophes à manger” in Paris at the Galerie du Temple. The public, physically in attendance, and real, in a state to consider the work of art as it were, ideal audience, sighted and visionary, in the pure tradition of tragedy. Marina Olympios attempts a new way of revealing art to the public in situations blending social activities and aesthetics.

Can art, by itself, transform the absurd to images that we can tolerate to live with? Is life not possible thanks to art illusions, to enjoyment of appearances? Placed in front of a work of art this complex, we must learn to enjoy it with the abundance of our senses, even though there may be reasons to worry that, placed in front of such a work of art, we be tempted to break it down, to break it up when it actually conceals the primary unit of natural sovereign instincts.

Blue Pigs aims at awakening emotions, heady irrational, saturated with sensuality. Who may belong to whom, who is certain to be whom, when every minute is panic. Blue Pigs carries us into the insides of a being, into the perplexity of something beyond us and takes a little from “demon”, it is a work of art profoundly irrigated by myth, and the will of giving to get to know, though self-irony and despair, a human becoming. She invites us to watch over our shoulder, be on our guards, and face like an artist, our fear for the future of art. This contact revival with myth and the sacred allows us to surpass our profane condition to better conjure up contradictions and tensions of our “individual times”. With Blue Pigs, we hope of nothing less perhaps than an exquisite amorous, but fatal, feast.

Elisabeth Chambon, June 1997

Art Historian - Conservateur du Musée Géo - Charles, France