As a young boy, conceptual artist Christos Linou would help his mum with a variety of domestic chores. One of his favourites he remembers was making orange glyko tou koutaliou. Christos and his mum would spends hours in the kitchen – first peeling the oranges, sewing them up again, and then fermenting them to form the edible sweet. But it was what happened during this cultural event. The stories told to Christos about his parents’ time in Cyprus, and the importance of holding on to his heritage, the songs sung by his mother. This cultural significance is precisely what the artist is going to capture in his upcoming durational performance Naked Peel.
Throughout his twelve hour performance, Christos will select, peel, sew and recreate his own personal tale as a child of migrants.
“It’s about my parents’ journey from Cyprus to Australia in the early 1950s and in honour of that journey I will peel 1,200 oranges as a personal reflection into my heritage,” Linou tells Neos Kosmos.
This performance is based on his master’s research, on durational performance at the Melbourne University as part of his two-year scholarship in a Master of Fine Arts. Christos wants to explore his cultural background using this method of art; he wants to fall into a “long durational trance” during the performance, which will ultimately encourage audience members to fall under the same artistic spell.
“The audience can come into the gallery, observe, watch – and I want to listen and learn from their interaction and discussion,” he says.
Even though Christos will be in a performative state, he will still encourage the audience to participate in a passive way. They can pick up the oranges and put themselves into the performance, they can ask questions that he will respond to by writing on a large wall behind him. The whole performance will be improvised depending on where it takes him, but with a distinct message.
For Christos the orange peels represent the skin-deep nature of cultural diversity and asylum seeker dialogues.
“My parents came by boat, and that was encouraged,” he explains, “but today it’s not an encouraged image.”
He wants to challenge people’s perception of migrants, of asylum seekers, of refugees by making a political statement through his performance art.
“The metaphor is that when you peel back an orange it’s simply flesh, fluid and structure,” he starts.
“When you peel back human skin, it’s the same – it’s flesh, fluid and structure. So this work is based on understanding others’ cultures by saying ultimately, we are all the same,”he says, adding that the citric DNA of oranges is similar to human DNA.
This performance is not only incorporating cultural events shared with his mother; Christos will also reflect on his time with his father. A brick layer by trade, Christos would accompany his dad out on the site. He is going to be taking some of the orange peels to build dome like figures, and also choreographic sculptural shapes.
“Some of the shapes will represent folk dancing that I have in my body, like rembetika and tsifteteli, but also Ancient Greek gods,” he says, stating that most of the performance will evolve on the day.
Christos Linou’s past works have toured in Singapore, Amsterdam and many Australian dance festivals. His short films and animations have been screened across Australia and in Taiwan, Singapore and Toronto.
Christos Linou co-founded Intertextual Bodies whose work, Act of Refusing to Dance, was part of the 2003 Melbourne Festival. His film Till Death Us Do Part was screened at the 2012 Singapore Arts Festival and he performed his dance work Hypnos at 59 Rivoli in Paris. He was a foundation artist in Dancehouse in the early ’90s and worked with IHOS Opera for 21 years.
Linou is now preparing for Berlin where he has been invited to the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz.
Naked Peel will take place at D11 @ Docklands Gallery: Shop 3, 427 Docklands Drive, Docklands. The performance will be held on Saturday 5 October between 9am – 9pm. The exhibition will run from 7 to 12 October (Mon – Sat 10am – 5pm)