NIKOS NAVRIDIS

1. Thessaloniki, January 2015. The revolving door at the exit was broken, I was told by the pavilion guard. The idea of repair as a second chance.
2. Marcel Duchamp, Door, 11 Rue Larrey, 1927. A door that can only close the entrance to one room, but never both at the same time — a door that is both functional and dysfunctional. A ready made that bisects domestic security and is a parody of privacy and seclusion.
3. The first piece that S. Beckett wrote for television was Eh Joe (BBC2, 4 July 1966). The play opens with Joe examining doors of various sizes, which open to the walls and therefore lead to nowhere. They refer to an external threat that comes from within and take you far back.
4. “No one who embarks on a life in theatre goes unpunished”: Tadeusz Kantor’s message outside the room warned the audience about the risks involved in participating in the conspiratorial act and his play.
Audience participation is an event with unforeseeable consequences. The work is a metonymy of reality. It is situated at the point where life intersects with theatre.
5. Endgame. A story about extraordinary cohabitations made of affection and sadism. A story that takes a sarcastic look at feebleness, dependence
and the things invented to dispel them. We have all at some point been like Hamm, Clov or both at the same time.
6. Compressed time (the shortest path); the time it takes for a door to open, enough to walk through a farce, but also sufficient to dismiss fruitless returns. Just enough time to reach the beginning, your point of departure, and reach, therefore, your final destination. Another meaning of the word exit, as we experience it today in our country.
7. Modern revolving doors feature metal or even chemical detectors. They are essential security devices at airports and detention centers. They can also be equipped with surveillance and face recognition systems.
8. The main benefit of a revolving door is that it remains always open and closed at the same time.
Revolving door (or The Peristrophon), 2015
A revolving door leading nowhere, which has no use, which mocks and bluffs, since, no matter from which point you enter, the exit is the entrance and vice versa. This work is about “the endgame of Myths”, the prominence that entraps us, the lost opportunities that became myths exactly because they were lost. The revolving movement takes the form of punishment, as there is nothing to distinguish the beginning from the end, or the inside from the outside; a mistake can lead to preplanned
opportunities, to repeated failures, to the torture of desperate optimism described by Gramsci. Peristrofon is exactly about this endless obsession with failed strategies, and about worlds that are opposed by volition, which will never meet because of the intellect.
… “The end is in the beginning and yet you go on” 1 Hamm appears to whisper with a grin on his face, as he observes the spectators.
“Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on
earth, there’s no cure for that!”2
…And pushes the door to get out, to save himself.
Nikos Navridis
1-2 Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie,
editions de Minuit, Paris, 1957