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.
REVERB. Performing the Archive of Motherhood.
May 29 & June 3, 19:00
Library, National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum
Entrance: 1 Michalakopoulou, 116 34
Maria Sideri is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and mother based in Athens. In 2023, she completed her PhD with distinction at the University of Western Macedonia with the thesis “Convergences of Performance and Archive: Archives and Bodies in Flux.” Her work explores the intersections of corporeality and archival research, expanding the notions of archive and documentation through and with the body. She reconsiders the archive not as a static site of power but as a living and fluid medium, proposing embodied and performative approaches that reshape archival methodologies and knowledge production. She studied Classical Philology at the University of Ioannina and History of Religion at the University of Geneva. In 2012, she graduated with distinction from the MA in Creative Practice at the Laban Conservatory of Music and Dance in London. She has received grants from the Arts Council of England for the project Vibrant Matter/La Métachorie and from ARTWORKS (1st SNF Artist Fellowship, 2018). Her work has been presented in Greece and internationally at WAC (2025), Summer Festival Kampnagel & Theater der Welt (2023), In Lieu of a Prism (2023), Outraged by Pleasure (2023), This Current Between Us (2022), Phenomenon (2022), Kiev Biennale (2021), MOMus (2021), Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center - SNFCC (2019).