When:
Tuesday, November 11, 2025 | 18:00-21:00

Where:
Demos Center, 17 Ipitou Str., Athens, Plaka Building

Organized by:
Theatre and Visual Arts Departments, The American College of Greece

Curated by
Jennifer Nelson and Thanos Vovolis for current Theatre, Performance and Visual Arts community in Athens, students and alumni

In collaboration with
Despina Zacharopoulou

About the event:

Performance artist and academic Dr. Despina Zacharopoulou (Royal College of Art, London), will be giving a 3-hour master class focused on potential ways that one might start rethinking what is at stake in contemporary performance art, and how one might use performance-led methodologies for their own artistic practice.

The master class will include a lecture, a practical workshop and a Q&A session.

Suggested preparation for the master class participants:

• Please wear comfortable clothes.
• Please be on time.
• Please bring water, coffee etc with you and something light to eat during the short break, in case you feel hungry.
• Please be aware that there will be photos and videos taken during the master class, which might then be published and/or uploaded on the Internet.
• The lecture includes images that might disturb sensitive audiences.

About the artist:

Despina Zacharopoulou
Visiting Lecturer & Short Course Leader, Contemporary Art Summer School, Royal College of Art, London
Despina was born in Arcadia, Greece. She is the Academic Leader of the RCA Contemporary Art Summer School and of the ‘Rethinking Contemporary Performance Art’ master class. She has been leading MA Crits, Tutorials and School Groups at the RCA since 2016. Despina holds a Practice-led PhD in Philosophy and Fine Art (Performance, Royal College of Art) supported by an Onassis Foundation Scholarship, a Master in Fine Arts, a Master in Visual Arts (Costume Design, Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Art) supported by the Greek State’s Scholarship Foundation, a MSc & a Diploma (Hons) in Architecture, all of the above awarded with the highest distinction (summa cum laude). Despina radically re-thinks performance art as ‘Spatium Monstrorum’: ‘surface’ occupied only by intensities, locus of parrhēsia, stage of trauma, event of Beauty and philosophy-as-embodied practice. Despina Zacharopoulou’s research approaches and interests revolve around a radical rethinking and re-making of performance art, moving away from traditional approaches which limit live art discourse within binaries, essentialism and fixed identities. What Despina suggests instead is a re-situating of contemporary performance art as ‘surface’ occupied and circulated only by intensities. While dismissing the practice vs theory binary, Despina Zacharopoulou’s approach acquires the form of a zētēsis or flânerie, and involves performance making as its research method, subject and output (research-as-practice), fed by a constant dialogue of exchanges with philosophical texts that promote non-dialectical systems of thought (e.g. Spinoza, Foucault, Bataille, Deleuze & Guattari, De Sade, Lyotard, Nietzsche, Klossowski, Barad, Golding, etc.). Despina’s goal is to re-situate philosophy as embodied practice and method, and raise the question of whether contemporary performance art might operate as a mode de vie (a way of life) for a life which is radically other, experienced in its full intensity, in parrhēsia and in pure joy. Her areas of interest include: modal ontologies, BDSM, surface topologies, technologies of the self, morphogenesis, chaos theory, vulnerability, practices of care, philosophies of ‘difference’, carnal knowledge.

To find out more about Despina Zacharopoulou, click here