Carnation Songs (To Death We Dance) (2024)
found book plates, archival pigment prints
found book plates, archival pigment prints
Carnation Songs (To Death We Dance) examines the social, historical, and cultural dimensions of urban Greek folk music, focusing on its recurring themes of death, violence, poverty, and emotional agony. The heartrending verses of popular (Laiko1) songs—tales of social injustice, despair, and death set to the sound of bouzouki2—have long formed the thematic backdrop to mainstream Greek entertainment, in both domestic and public settings. This is a socio-cultural phenomenon distinct to Greece and Cyprus, where celebration, in a characteristically Mediterranean temperament, weaves exuberance, singing, and dance together with lyrics of anguish, misery, and ruin. This contradiction raises the question at the heart of the project: why do we dance to death?
The "stage," or bouzoukia (Greek jargon for nightclubs staging live Laiko performances), is an enchanting term among Greeks, alluding not only to a distinct form of entertainment—the epitome of Greek nightlife—but to an idiosyncratic social ritual with implications across the fabric of everyday life. It is within these premises that Greeks find an outlet for emotional release, singing and dancing alongside the headlining performers (affectionately known as "big names"), while enacting a further, distinct ritual: the throwing of hundreds of carnations onto the stage. The audience expresses its admiration by scattering trays of flowers before the singer, a custom that succeeded the earlier practice of smashing gypsum plates as an expression of collective joy.
The project is conceived as a cross-disciplinary installation of image and text, in which literary re-appropriations of popular lyrics referencing death and destruction are recomposed into new textual fragments, juxtaposed against found and newly produced images of carnations and carnation arrangements. Through this exchange between written and visual language, the project examines questions of national narrative, cultural semiotics, and the rituals through which historical, social, and cultural identity is affirmed.
1. After the end of WWII and the Greek Civil War, Greece entered a period of relative economic prosperity and the middle class, which had suffered through extreme poverty in the 1940s, began living more comfortably, a fact that was bound to be reflected in its choice of entertainment. At the same time a new generation of musicians came of age that had grown up with Rebetiko, a musical and cultural expression directly linked to singing and dancing that initially spread among the urban lower and working-class populations in the early twentieth century. Its themes reflected the harsh realities of marginalized subculture's lifestyle such as crime, alcohol abuse, drugs, poverty, prostitution and violence, but also a multitude of themes of relevance to Greek people of any social stratum: death, eroticism, exile, exoticism, love, marriage, and the recent events at Asia Minor with its subsequent refugee experience. Evolving from Rembetiko, popular music (Laiko) emerged during the 50’s and 60’s, which now reflected Greece’s “modernized” social and cultural standing, an amalgamation of western and Middle Eastern cultural influences. Songs became more upbeat, and references to drug use and criminal activity slowly declined, while poverty, hardships, love and violence figured prominently as key themes. Since then, Laiko, and its various sub-genres have dominated Greek music entertainment.
2. The bouzouki, a popular musical instrument in Greece, is a member of the long-necked lute family, with a round body with a flat top and a long neck with a fretted fingerboard. It has steel strings and is played with a plectrum producing a sharp metallic sound, reminiscent of a mandolin but pitched lower. The instrument was brought to Greece in the early 1900s by Greek refugees from Anatolia, and quickly became the central instrument to the rebetiko genre and its music branches. It is now an important element of modern Laiko pop Greek music.