(REST IN) BLUE | Katerina Foti

A work inspired by the traces of people who are no longer here but live through us and inhabit our bodily inheritance. A choreography sparked by the blue tarpaulins that cover all the buildings under construction in Athens. Beneath them, a piece of collective and personal history is buried, a fragment of memories, as well as the past lives of the people who contributed to rebuilding Athens and who raised in its apartment blocks our generation, the millennials, relentlessly battered by crisis, disillusionment, gentrification, nostalgia, and major social change.

Linking the blue of the tarpaulin to the phrase “I’m blue,” choreographer Katerina Foti searches for the imprint of life that inhabits the walls that are being torn down today, so their use can change. How much intergenerational memory can fit in an apartment block that will become an Airbnb, and how many stories are uprooted through shattered mosaics? How do you carry your roots and foundations when you have to put them down in new places?

The research for the work “(REST IN) BLUE” took place within the Onassis AiR Residency 2024.

During the research process, Katerina Foti unexpectedly lost her father and became a mother. As a result, “(REST IN) BLUE” developed into a choreographic autoethnography, as she uses personal material connected to her own memory and the mutability of her identity in the midst of grief and early motherhood, in dialogue with an Athens whose identity is gradually fraying.

The heroine of the work will move house on stage, and through this premise, we will ask what we carry with us from our roots and our youth, and how our identity shifts continuously as we bring everything that shaped us into our luggage.

To the girls who became mothers

To the baby blues and the identity crises

To the hangouts that closed down

To the hangouts we abandoned

To our hometowns and our birthgivers

To our villages

To cassette tapes with dedications

To the most beautiful folk songs

To Mo Better and to Decadence

To forties

To my dad, Giorgos, who passed away in April 2024

To my son, Giorgos, who was born in December 2024

And to Dionysis, who became the thread of both Giorgos and turned my darkness into light