Presenting Nathalie Karagiannis text ‘Dago’ for three voices, piano and electronics in Thessaloniki at @topikap.kato and Athens @tvcontrolcenter 21.10 and the 28.10 respectively.

“Dago starts out from the death of a 19 year old Greek immigrant, my uncle, in Tasmania in 1956 and the silent mourning surrounding it. The text is first of all a reflection on this selective silence, the erased name, a name constantly encountered and constantly avoided. The avoidance of the names of the deceased is part of the customs of the people of Tasmania (and of the whole of Australia): the larger phenomenon is called ‘avoidance speech´ by ethnolinguists. This coincidence, like several others that emerge from audio and visual documents of the time, leads to an exploration of the encounter of the indigenous people of Tasmania and of the Greeks who land there in 1956 as other Blacks – a colour which is included in my surname along with Dago’s name.

The photo captures Fanny Cochrane Smith being recorded claiming that she is the last of the Tasmanians, a claim retracted by her later, and which led to a long controversy around the reasons that British (and generally Western) anthropology offered for inducing such a reading of the results of a particularly brutal page of colonialism.”

With Angeliki Papoulia, Dimitra Kationi, Nathalie Karagiannis and Christos Barbas