Onassis Foundation Announces Programming For ARCHIVE OF DESIRE: A Festival Inspired By The Poet C.P. Cavafy

The Onassis Foundation announced the full schedule of events comprising the multi-disciplinary, multi-venue "Archive of Desire": A Festival Inspired by the Poet C. P. Cavafy, which is presented in collaboration with National Sawdust and takes place April 28 through May 6, 2023, with special offerings throughout April.

Conceived by Onassis Culture Director Afroditi Panagiotakou and the curatorial team at the foundation's headquarters in Athens, and curated by celebrated composer and National Sawdust co-founder and artistic director Paola Prestini, the festival honors Cavafy's far-reaching legacy and ongoing relevance by illustrating his work's ability to spark creativity and imagination across a wide range of art forms. Karen Brooks Hopkins, President Emerita of Brooklyn Academy of Music, now Senior Advisor and Board member of the Onassis Foundation, serves as the festival's Executive Producer. Pomegranate Arts is the festival's producing partner, and ALL ARTS is the media sponsor.

Tickets and full details are available at the festival's website.

"Archive of Desire" - which takes its name from a new work by acclaimed poet Robin Coste Lewis, written for this occasion and inspired by her experience viewing the Cavafy archive in Athens - convenes some of today's most category-defying artists to further interpret Cavafy's prismatic legacy, propelling it even further into the future, and revisiting it as a fertile source for inspiration. "Archive of Desire" is both an homage to Cavafy and a radical approach to animating and expanding the legacy and impact of a deceased artist. The Onassis Foundation has taken great care and effort to maintain, digitize, and share his work and ephemera, ensuring they are freely accessible for engagement with academic study and creative innovation.

Events and activations will take place at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, McNally Jackson Bookstores, the Onassis Foundation's ONX Studio in the Olympic Tower, the New Museum, St. Thomas Church with Death of Classical, The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, Rockefeller Center, Columbia University, and elsewhere throughout the city.

Highlights include a new installation on the exterior wall of National Sawdust by Nick Cave & Bob Faust (on view from April 29); an evening of creative synergy across multiple artistic genres with poet Robin Coste Lewis, visual artist Julie Mehretu, composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and director Charlotte Brathwaite (May 3 and 4); and a "visual rave" from Juliana Huxtable (May 6). Death of Classical will produce a concert of new music commissions and newly arranged works by Laurie Anderson, Helga Davis & Petros Klampanis, Nico Muhly (arranged by Nathan Thatcher), Dimitris Papadimitriou, Paola Prestini, and Rufus Wainwright (arranged by Missy Mazzoli), with performances by Anderson, Davis, Klampanis, Wainwright, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus led by Dianne Berkun Menaker, The Knights, and soprano Eleni Calenos (May 2). Other programs include a performance wherein Sister Sylvester's handmade art-books will be read communally by the audience, with a live-score by Nadah El Shazly (April 28); visual art offerings ranging from Ali Santana's reimagining of a Cavafy poem as immersive, experimental Hip Hop experience (opening April 28), to a video work and artistic research project from Matthew Niederhauser & Marc Da Costa (opening April 28); a five-hour marathon reading of Cavafy's oeuvre (April 30); and an international academic symposium paired with musical exploration and poetic expression featuring leading Cavafy scholars Stathis Gourgouris and Karen Emmerich alongside Orfeas Apergis, Yiannis Doukas, Phoebe Giannisi, Katerina Iliopoulou, Haytham al-Wardani, Iman Mersal, Janlori Goldman, Robin Coste Lewis, Brenda Shaughnessy, Susan Bernofsky, Brent Edwards, Sofía Avramidou, Marcos Balter, Zosha di Castri, Stylianos Dimou, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Lena Platonos, and Georgios Poniridis, featuring the National Sawdust Ensemble under the music direction of Jeffrey Zeigler, with Greek guest musicians Yiannis Palamidas (voice) and Stergios Tsirliagos (synths) (May 1). A series of visual poems will be presented throughout the festival, and at a public screening (May 4). These films-which include works created both in New York, conceived and produced by Elena Park/Lumahai Productions, and in Greece by Onassis Stegi - feature contributions from Jad Abumrad, Justin Ervin, Evi Kalogeropoulou, Taylor Mac, Steven E. Mallorca, Julianne Moore, Elena Park, Mac Premo, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Carl Hancock Rux, Christos Sarris in collaboration with incarcerated individuals in Greece, Pete Scalzitti, Bora Yoon, and Jeffrey Ziegler.

To celebrate C. P. Cavafy's impact on modern poetry, his intellectual legacy, and his queer and diasporic identity as a man who deftly danced between the ancient world and the modern metropolis, McNally Jackson book stores will be transformed into living invitations for passers by to discover or reconsider Cavafy and his canon. Each of McNally Jackson's seven city-wide locations from Nolita to Laguardia Airport will house artfully made tiny poetry libraries dedicated to the poet and his work. A limited number of complimentary totes and commemorative bookmarks will be available. Additionally, McNally Jackson has curated a series of three literary talks for the Festival with writers and intellectuals who will deeply consider Cavafy's work, identity, and artistic footprint: Cavafy as Queer Poet with Stamatina Gregory and Richie Hofmann (April 19), Cavafy as World Poet with Daniel Mendelsohn and Jana Prikryl (April 27), and Why Read Cavafy? with André Aciman and Paul Holdengräber. In honor of the Festival, and aligned with National Poetry Month, McNally Jackson will be highlighting C. P. Cavafy The Collected Poems translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou as its April 2023 book-of-the-month selection.

Music inspired by Cavafy will also fill the air in a free installation at the rink-level public space of Rockefeller Center. National Sawdust's latest cohort of Hildegard Commission composers, emerging artists who are women or of other traditionally marginalized genders, were given the works of Cavafy to use as a source of inspiration for their commissions. The resulting works, recorded by the National Sawdust Ensemble, will be available as a sonic installation from April 3 - May 6, 2023.

"ARCHIVE OF DESIRE": A FESTIVAL INSPIRED BY THE POET C. P. CAVAFY

Constantinopoliad

April 28, 2023 @ 7:00PM

National Sawdust, 80 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn, NY

TICKETS

"Archive of Desire": A Festival Inspired by the Poet C.P. Cavafy will officially open at National Sawdust with the premiere of a performance by artist Sister Sylvester and musical artist Nadah El Shazly. Sister Sylvester will create handmade art-books to be read communally by the audience, inside of a live-score by El Shazly. The work is inspired by the blank and torn out pages in "Constantinopoliad, an Epic", the journal Cavafy began when he and his family fled Alexandria to sail to Constantinople when the poet was just 18 years old, and by the poet's erotic poems, where he meets with ghosts across time.

The narrative will also introduce the audience to a little-known Greek astronomer who was in Constantinople at the same time as Cavafy, and who developed a "scale for seeing" for amateur astronomers to record levels of atmospheric interference in their observations.

Lit, 2023: A Facility Artwork by Nick Cave and Bob Faust

Unveiling Date: April 29, 2023 @ 5:30PM

National Sawdust, 80 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn, NY

FREE

"Later, in a more perfect society, someone else made just like me is certain to appear and act freely."

An excerpt from the C. P. Cavafy poem "Hidden Things" serves as the landscape for Lit, 2023, a newly commissioned mural co-created by Nick Cave & Bob Faust for an exterior wall of Brooklyn's National Sawdust. The quote resonated with Cave & Faust as a visceral connection to human insecurities, and the potential for human progress and communal empowerment. A billboard-scale expression of radical joy intended to refuel us on our way toward that more perfect society, the mural will make use of the cumulative powers of its visual components: Cavafy's prescient words, an image of a Nick Cave soundsuit, and the facade of National Sawdust itself. Cave originally developed his now famous soundsuits to create a camouflage for the wearer's shape, constructing a second skin that hides gender, race, and class, and compelling the audience to observe without judgment, operating less as an armor and more as a key to unlock one's own full expression. Faust worked with Cave to select an image of a soundsuit from 2003 for use in this large scale public artwork to integrate as an anthropomorphic representation of how an individual body may be bound to a certain time and place, but that with perseverance and hard work, will eventually be released from the walls which contain it.

Walls

April 28-May 6, 2023 @ 12:00PM - 6:00PM daily (closed Monday, May 1, and Tuesday, May 2)

ONX Studio, the Onassis Foundation's Extended Reality Studio, 645 5th Ave, Lower Level, NY 10022

Walls is an interactive, audiovisual installation by artist Ali Santana that reimagines C. P. Cavafy's poem of the same title as an immersive, experimental Hip Hop experience. In this installation, participants must work together to solve an interactive rhythm poem. By activating a sequence of beats, rhythms and stanzas that combine key elements of Cavafy's original poem, the installation is transformed into a wholly unique and expansive fractal world.

New York emcee ELUCID lends his distinctive voice to this project by engaging in dialogue with the original text from 1897. His lyrical cadence and mantras play off of Cavafy's themes while expressing a shared vision of freedom invoked through traditions of call-and-response.

Ekphrasis

April 28-May 6, 2023 @ 12:00PM - 6:00PM daily (closed Monday, May 1, and Tuesday, May 2)

ONX Studio, the Onassis Foundation's Extended Reality Studio, 645 5th Ave, Lower Level, NY 10022

Ekphrasis is a video work and artistic research project devised by Matthew Niederhauser and Marc Da Costa that explores how poetry can illuminate the algorithmic systems that form the backdrop of our lives and, increasingly, shape what we feel and imagine. In the work, C. P. Cavafy's poetry becomes a filter and prompt to interrogate the visuality of today's machine learning tools. These technologies are the magic sorcerers of the moment, spooking and exciting us, yet drawing their material not from a supernatural world beyond, but instead from the zeitgeist of images and text that live online.

Cavafy's poetic corpus can provide a glimpse into how artificially intelligent systems attempt to construe and interpret the more subjective edges of language. Our results will be cataloged into a printed compendium which will also act as a codex to a multimedia installation that will cycle through different machine learning responses to the poem, including AI-driven readings and other visual renderings of his poetry.

of the neighborhood that I behold: a Cavafy Marathon

April 30, 2023 @ 2:00PM - 7:00PM

The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, 131 E. 10th Street, New York, NY

TICKETS

On April 30, 2023, The Poetry Project will present of the neighborhood that I behold: a Cavafy Marathon. A five-hour event, titled by a line of text in the poem "In The Same Space," will include readings by notable poets, writers, actors, activists, civic and community leaders and performances featuring music, dance and other interpretations. Celebrating the breadth of Cavafy's work - his complex questions and reflections on diaspora, queerness, time, history, and memory through his exploration of the City in contrast to the State, this marathon format will serve as a many-voiced tapestry, weaving together narrative and civic identity; considering what we do within evolving communities through our inherited and shifting mythologies; and questioning what modes and methods of authorship shape our sense of place, origin, and future.

Each hour will be curated around one theme or idea prevalent in Cavafy's work and will include 10 readings or reflections on a Cavafy poem(s), for a total of 50 unique Cavafy moments.

Days of 2023

May 1, 2023

Daytime symposium @ 9:30AM - 3:00PM

Columbia University, Heyman Center, Common Room

TICKETS (virtual and in-person options)

Evening concert @ 7:00PM

Miller Theatre at Columbia University, 2960 Broadway, New York, NY

A symposium for poets from New York, Egypt and Greece will be held at Columbia University and led by professors Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia) and Karen Emmerich (Princeton), both members of the Cavafy Academic Committee that advised on the digitization of Cavafy's archive. The title, Days of 2023, references Cavafy's many works named "Days of," with the year of their writing, or a date of reflection.

The Columbia Hellenic Studies department will host a two-part event on May 1, 2023. A daylong workshop, co-sponsored by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, will feature invited poets Orfeas Apergis, Yiannis Doukas, Phoebe Giannisi, Katerina Iliopoulou (Greece); Haytham al-Wardani, Iman Mersal (Egypt); Janlori Goldman, Robin Coste Lewis, Brenda Shaughnessy (US), as well as translators Susan Bernofsky, Brent Edwards, and Karen Emmerich, who will conduct roundtable conversations on the multiple ramifications of C. P. Cavafy as a 21st-century phenomenon. The titles of the roundtables are: "History and Politics of the Interstitial"; "Translation as a Poetic Act"; "Erotics and Poetics of the Undisclosed".

That evening, in the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, a free event will feature the poets performing either Cavafy poems in Greek and/or Arabic or new writing prepared for the occasion, paired with music by Sofía Avramidou, Marcos Balter, Zosha di Castri, Stylianos Dimou, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Lena Platonos, and Georgios Poniridis, which will be performed by the National Sawdust Ensemble under the music direction of Jeffrey Zeigler, with Greek guest musicians Yiannis Palamidas (voice) and Stergios Tsirliagos (synths).

Death of Classical Presents Waiting For The Barbarians

May 2, 2023 @ 6:30PM wine and cheese reception (incl. In ticket), 7:30PM curtain

St. Thomas Church, 1 West 53rd Street, New York, NY

TICKETS

A sprawling, one-night-only exploration of love, loss, lust, and longing centered around the poetry of C. P. Cavafy produced by Death of Classical, Waiting for the Barbarians, named after one of the Greek poet's most famous works, is a program of entirely new musical compositions that will take listeners on a journey across genres and sonic worlds.

Seated amidst the towering Gothic arches of Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, the program features world premiere performances of new works by Laurie Anderson, Helga Davis & Petros Klampanis, Nico Muhly (arranged by Nathan Thatcher), Dimitris Papadimitriou, Paola Prestini, and Rufus Wainwright (arranged by Missy Mazzoli). New York orchestral collective The Knights and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus will perform throughout, accompanying Wainwright, Anderson, Davis & Klampanis, and soprano Eleni Calenos.

Chandelier (I went)

Composed by Rufus Wainwright, arranged by Missy Mazzoli

Performed by Rufus Wainwright and The Knights

Cavafy Ghost

Composed by Helga Davis & Petros Klampanis

Performed by Helga Davis, Petros Klampanis, The Knights, and Brooklyn Youth Chorus - Dianne Berkun Menaker

The Return

Composed and arranged by Dimitris Papadimitriou

Performed by Eleni Calenos and The Knights

Far Away Songs

Composed by Nico Muhly, arranged by Nathan Thatcher

Performed by Eleni Calenos and The Knights

Voices

Composed by Paola Prestini

Performed by Brooklyn Youth Chorus - Dianne Berkun Menaker

Waiting for the Barbarians

Composed by Laurie Anderson

Performed by Laurie Anderson, The Knights, and Brooklyn Youth Chorus - Dianne Berkun Menaker

Archive of Desire

May 3 & 4, 2023 @ 7:00PM

National Sawdust, 80 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn, NY

TICKETS - May 3; TICKETS - May 4

In Archive of Desire, Robin Coste Lewis, Julie Mehretu, Vijay Iyer, Jeffrey Zeigler, and Charlotte Brathwaite meditate collaboratively on the sensuality of C. P. Cavafy, diaspora, and the liminal spaces present everywhere in his work. The evening draws inspiration from Cavafy's archive, processing the sonic, visual, and cultural tones found in his poetry through recitation, live music, electronics, and new visual work.

Visual Cavafy

May 4, 2023, @ 6:30PM - Screening with artist Q&A

May 5 - 6, 2023 - films on view throughout the day with museum entry fee

New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY

The Onassis Foundation has commissioned a series of visual poems entitled Visual Cavafy, exploring the cinematic power of Cavafy's language. Featured artists will include Taylor Mac; Julianne Moore; Carl Hancock Rux with Daniel Bernard Roumain, Bora Yoon, and Jeffrey Ziegler. Visual Cavafy showcases the work of directors Evi Kalogeropoulou, Elena Park, and Christos Sarris in collaboration with incarcerated individuals in Greece; creators