Synapses (2014), 7 public domains, 15 performers. Duration two days.
Synapses consists of seven staged performances, taking place simultaneously in seven different public locations/ neighborhoods in the city of Milan. Each performance is developed in relation to each location, and follows a script that mirrors, loosely, the historical, social and economic background of the seven public domains.
The performances' unassuming and integrated nature, transform the public space and the unaware passersby to a spectator/spectacle, challenged both mentally and physically by the flow and unexpected happening or art right next to him/her.
Synapses explicitly draw inspiration from the Situationist derives, the book Synchronicity by Carl G. Jung and the action 49 Waltzes for the 5 Boroughs by John Cage.
Synapses (2014), 7 photographic compositions, photographs, b&w archival images, dimensions variable.
Synapses, consists of seven minimal staged or improvised situations, happening simultaneously in different locations in the city of Milan Italy. These seven events take a material form in the gallery space, while rooting the whole process in the urban scale of the city. For each location where the actions are taking place, Tsivopoulos dug in the Civic Photographic Archive of the City of Milan, discovering series of photos (taken between 1985 and the end of the 90s) commissioned by the municipality to document the development of the city, while he took new shots surveying the selected areas. The seven clusters of photos and texts that sprung out of this research are bonding together different temporalities of seven angles of Milan, revealing clues about the evolution of these locales. The banality of the ordinary is interpreted as an invitation to unexpected journeys in the city, where the constitutive elements of collective memory are liberated in a free associative realm in which a synaptic gaze can work new subjective configurations.