As a part of the Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival we presented this one-day workshop and exploration of love and intentionality. We introduced collaborative tools to cruise Thessaloniki. Using our bodies and imaginations, we found ways to queer the erotic potentials and reclaim desires within the urban landscape to produce transformative mappings of lust. Leaving behind traces for others to discover, we revealed Eros, as an all-consuming force in the intermingling stories and lives of the city. Reading, walking, passing through, biographing objects, all embodied in our utopic interventions. The coming together of people unknown, intrigued by the sensuality of place, stimulated spontaneous, uncharted erotic encounters within the city. The methodology of cruising intends to become an instigator for continuity of our love and all its dynamic powers.

Download your own copy of Cruising the Erotic City  ZINE READER .

Carte Postales left erotic traces of our walk and explorations for others to find.

“spirituality is human’s top quest in the times of loss”
the perfect market opportunity

Wholy Pigeon UnLmtd startup is reordering the economic and transcendental energy flows of Tinos, Greece. Our goal is to destabilize and decentralize the entrenched powers that shape how visitors interact with the island. Tinos has a strong brand identity as a place of pilgrimage, inspired by the reputedly miraculous icon of the Panagia Evangelistria. Recent marketing campaigns appeal to the more earthly desires, promising a destination with inspiring art, epicurean delights, and pristine beaches. Tourist and pilgrims perform many of the same rituals, their journeys consist of a series of performances where movements intertwine with prescriptions within embodied spaces of production and consumption.  Both seek transformative experiences and material encounters, hoping for an epiphany [miracle or no miracle], desiring a sense of connection along the way, performing a pre-memory, redeeming a suffering; both take selfies and pick up memorabilia from Tinos to transport and extend the value of their journey.

In spaces that bring tourists [religious or not] closer to salvation (a means of escape), the body {of both the pilgrim and tourist} is considered a medium which can expand knowledge of the world and experience states of becoming, through doing.

The suffering of the body, in capitalism and religion, is an intensified experience that manifests in communal rites, an anteroom to return renewed (reborn, rejuvenated, resurrected) back home.

Through our research we identified that both the church and leisure holiday businesses had enclosed and capitalized on promises of redemption and healing. Dovetailing with these spiritual trends, the Wholy Pigeon UnLmtd. (WPU) embarked upon a strategy to reverse the extracting quality of tourism and pilgrimages and corner the market share of miracles that Tinos has to offer.

STONE READING STAND
To profit from pilgrims, heavy symbolism and selfies, we offer clients a new and improved ritual to access Tinosian powers of intentionality and a chance to be reborn as spiritual anarchist. Beginning with a guided visioning each individual infuses the stones with the coincidence of their encounter with WPU in Tinos, of all places in the universe. Reclaiming the commons of transcendental powers we provide guidance, inspiration, and meaning by reading stones gathered from the upper, lower, inner and outer parts of Tinos. These stones foretell each clients relation to their unique path as it intermingles with flows on the island:

Inner– DESIRES that are the foundation of each individual quest

Upper– BARRIERS blocking the true path

Lower– SUPPORT system enabling the emergence of desires and intentions

Outer– POSSIBILITY and meaning of the coincidences to take away

with Festival of the Commons 6-7-8 October 2017 Athens School of Fine Arts

The Festival of the Common has invited our networking platform to identify the most incubatable ventures. During the three days of the event, we will be roving throughout the venue offering participants the opportunity to share their venture manifesto and/or perspectives on potential production of the commons with a larger audience. The results will be brought to a peer to peer evaluation process in which the most dynamic commons ventures will be relieved of the pressures of creating alternative economic structures through sponsorship and will be provided with mentoring methodologies.  If our network executives approaches you during the festival offering you the chance to work for love, money, or crypto-tokens, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that you don’t want to miss.

Why? Because we want to establish collaborative practices that avoid the tragedy of the commons.

with The Island Resignified Lefkada, Greece July 1-15, 2017

Tourism Saved my Life — Lefkada edition

The poster project

Each town a different scene, a different audience, a different interaction, a different reaction….

The Metaxication start-up company was hired to research development opportunities in Lefkada. We evaluated potential places representative of the 1st and 3rd sector economy. It seems evident that the last decades the 1st sector has retreated giving way to the tourism industry. Why are key places from 1st sector no longer vital elements for the local and international communities? Our company’s intention is to understand the reasons why this happened and investigate possible ways of reactivation. We assume that there is use value in the area that is latent and we want to bring it to the surface. To reach this goal, we employed a mixed methodology of meetings with the locals and tourists, exploratory and observative drives, and public space interventions. We met with permanent residents diverse in age, gender, ethnicity, income and profession, to collect data about the area’s past and see also what connotations people attribute to this place today. We triggered discussions around several thematics, such as value, ruins, capital, community building, documentation and memory. What economic conditions resulted in the ruinous state of the buildings. How a place is valorized in relation to memory. What is a monument. Is value as a symbol contradictory to value as an experience ? How can residents, temporary or permanent, can be manipulated for the sake of our objectives? How can collected documents become merits of Metaxication Inc.’s capital ?

These topics will be addressed in more detail in social interventions throughout the island focusing on the ruinous landscapes of capital, memory and monuments, value and valorization, and subsumed documents.

These are some of the responses we had to “The End of Tourism is Near” poster project.

English ex-pat resident in Nidri– “What will the locals do? I just came out for a sunset drink and now I’m frightened”– her husband “I’m frightened, too!”

Restaurant owner Agios Nikitas “There is a problem with that poster……. its too small! you should make it much bigger!”

Husband of woman from Lefkada who comes to island every year “It is because the Greek service is not good enough- if tourism ends it is because of us, we are unorganized.”

Owner of kafenio, mountain village of Kavalos, “If tourism ends I will be more wealthy, I have my goats. I will invest more time in the goats and in agriculture. I am not afraid.” — His sister ” If tourism ends I will die. There is no other way for me to live, its easy and quick.”

Former hotel manager assistant in Lefkada, “According to big hotel owners, bad tourists are those who do not spend money.”

Cleaner at guesthouse in Alexandros, “Tourism saved my life.”

Tourist in Lefkada, Professor of Physics “Tourism alienates, we should stop thinking about money.”

Another expected outcome will be either one or more proposals of future development scenarios in the form of a business plan or [and] a ‘revitalising’ happenings on other Greek islands.

Coming to a tourist destination near you!

With Open Form Athens  June 28 7-10pm

Metaxication Inc. Reveals: what we are and why we do what we do so well.

Athens Subsumption, identifying itself as Metaxication Inc., an established corporation in the field of tracing international flows of capital, will host a focus group discussion around subsumptive process embedded in ‘’touristification” of place. A “creator” of integrated communication between companies & institutions with the most efficient means and established reputation for always bringing the extra value to each project, we work together. As a productive cohort, we will expand upon our current practice to develop marketable identities, enticing consumption of the exotic by offering new-ideals for distribution through social media. Our work/performance/ presentation will evolve the ‘end of tourism’ narrative we are developing for a start-up launch in the island of Lefkada, Greece. Our goal is to harness the shifting power dynamics within the realms of identity, authenticity and visual representation(s). During this process we will share our practices weaving together and connecting threads through the places we have encountered along the way that shape our current trajectory.

Metaxication Inc. reveals a new strategic approach currently in development. Honoring the seminal readymades of Marcel Duchamp, our Subsumption technology is on the cutting edge of the cut and paste frontier. We lower labor time and costs by cut and pasting directly from the corporate world, instantaneously transposing into a different conceptual context, reestablishing value and declaring it to be art. This Start-up business plan fully maximizes our ability to employ “detournement” of the Situationsts and contemporary “culture jamming” with a hackerspace ethos.

April 1, 2017    Identity Issues with Communitism

Contemporary societies undergo several processes of separation, a deterritorialization of communal affiliations that call forth identity-building, invention of heritage through nostalgia, and ideals of uniqueness and authenticity. This is often undertaken through “touristification” of place, as a means to creating a marketable identity, entice consumption of the exotic and in turn create a new self-identity ideal for distribution through social media. Metaxication, Inc. went back in business in our neighbourhood of origin: Metaxourgeio. This time we developed a strategy around the notion of Authentic-tourism, our mission? to create, under the theoretical scope of ‘subsumption’ of course, an edgy and commodifiable identity for the neighbourhood, leaving behind the traditional era of identity, embarking on a new beginning toward 2020 and beyond.

July 13, 2016    Communitism Midterm

Metaxication Inc., an established start-up corporation looking for passionate multitasking people to search for the common goods in your neighborhood. Who are these people and why do they use the term ‘subsumption’? Could this be a game ? Or maybe not?

June 4, 2016  Athens School of Fine Arts Performance Festival 

Metaxication Inc., a well-established corporation, is looking for passionate multitasking people holding critical thinking and organisation skills to share views and ideas for the foundation of a start-up company. The executives of Metaxication Inc. will present the corporation´s goals and methodology to potential new employees and investors. Through digital/visual and analogue/performative means as a point of departure, this focus group and strategic planning session are designed to launch future collaborations. We hope to see you there and together create utopian plans.

As Metaxication Inc. is a mock company, the presumed void behind the company’s structure and the impersonation of the executives´ roles, can be potentially perceived as the utopian space, the white screen to project our [the executives´ and the people´s] desires, hopes, visions and dreams that will nourish the future start-up.