Samuel Beckett “Not I”

Total darkness and a mouth lit up, muttering to itself. Deliriously, it recalls fragments and shattered pieces of its life, trying to understand…

The mouth belonged to a woman around seventy who did not speak.

She was a child born prematurely, abandoned, brought up in an institution, without love. As a grown up, whilst picking flowers in a field, she finds herself in darkness and, suddenly, her mouth explodes into a barrage, a torrential delirium, and begins to narrate her life in random fragments.

In agony, she tries to comprehend what is happening to her.

Her initial assumption is that she is being punished by God, but she realises she is not suffering. She cannot think why she would be punished, but she accepts that God does not need a “special reason” for his actions. She believes she has something to confess, and that if she overcomes the events of her life, that “something” will be revealed.

It was the early 1980s and Karolos Koun staged Samuel Beckett’s “Not I” at the Greek Art Theatre Karolos Koun (Theatro Technis).

The “Mouth” was Reni Pittaki.

The following year, I sat my exams for the Athens School of Fine Arts and passed. Since then, always experimenting on expanded uses of materials and visual transformations, with personal experience as my primary material, I have been exploring the ephemeral, human nature, loss. I create series of works that imply and trace the concept of humanity. Works that explore corporeality as a space within which Being is understood, where the human condition is found and finds its place; in a complex world that is defined by randomness and fluidity.

P.C.