REVERB. PERFORMING THE ARCHIVE OF MOTHERHOOD

What happens when motherhood ceases to function as an image and resonates as an experience? When care, exhaustion, desire, and interruption leave traces that do not fit into the archive but insist on being heard?

Reverb: Performing the Archive of Motherhood is a sound performance that moves between artistic research in contemporary art archives in Greece and personal testimony. A collage of personal memories, theoretical excerpts, voices and images that compose a performative narration in dialogue with visual artworks and archival traces.

Approaching motherhood not as an institution but as an unstable field of relationships, memory, and political negotiation, Reverb questions how the gaze and the ear shift to a space where contradictions, desires, absences, and discontinuities can be heard. Like an echo moving between the individual and the collective. Between the familiar and the historical. Between personal experience and the multiple forms of maternal heritage.

The work continues the artist’s long-standing artistic and academic research on the convergences between archive and performance, exploring how gesture, sound, and voice can redefine absence and institutional memory. Drawing on the artist’s recent experience of motherhood, the performance revolves around time, care, interruption, exhaustion, and the creative process, shedding light on the interplay and  tension between them.

Concept/Text/Performance/ Sound Design: Maria Sideri
Dramaturgical Support, Production Assistant, and Video Slides: Seta Astraiou-Karydi
Vocal Coaching: Maria Thoidou
Recording and sound engineering: Orestis Benekas

Acknowledgments to the archives, institutions, and individuals who contributed to the project’s research process: EMST, ISET, the National Gallery, the Benaki Museum, AMOQA, and Delphys; Athina Karathanasis, Evi Mitsopoulou, Eleni Gaiti, Tina Pandi, Natasha Tsaropoulou, Vasiliki Daniel and Polina Kosmadaki, Lydia Matthews,Christoforos Marinos, Charis Kanellopoulou, Leda Papakonstantinou, Lefki Christidou, Mantalina Psoma,  Irini Efstathiou, and Maria F. Dolores,  Paky Vlasopoulou and Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Yria Chorianopoulou, Giannis Xatziaslanis and Hypatia Vourloumis.

REVERB. Performing the Archive of Motherhood. is supported by the ARTWORKS Grants, funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) and other individual donors.

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REVERB. Performing the Archive of Motherhood.
May 29 & June 3, 2026 | 19:00
Library, National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum
Entrance: 1 Michalakopoulou, 116 34