MOUNTAINS COME FIRST 
(ATHENS 2021)

STEINZEIT Galerie BERLIN / January 21 - March 3, 2022
group exhibition: ATHENSYN II: GOING VIRAL EXHIBITION AND SYMPOSIUM FOR CONTEMPORARY GREEK ART

 http://www.athensyn.com/athensyn-ii–going-viral–.php

Video 34’
https://tavros.space/projects/correspondences-6/
As part of the collective cinema project Unfortunately, it was paradise.Comissioned by: Delphine Leccas (AIN) and Maria-Thalia Carras (Locus Athens)· Supported by: Rosa Luxembourg Foundation.

Juxhin Kapaj (Jorgo Prifti) uses a spade to dig, shoveling sand, arduously forming the shape of the mountain range that he passed in 1990 as he migrated from Albania to Greece. The rhythm of the spade digging alongside the sound of the waves on the beach creates a soft background noise covered only by Juxhin’s voice as he narrates his story: from Avlona (Albania), to the Ceraunian Mountains, onto Corfu and Athens. As he digs, he creates a ditch that functions like a negative of the mountain topography which slowly subsumes him the deeper he goes. The mountain formed by the dug-up sand looms over him and slowly even surpasses the horizon line. Meanwhile a lone rower passes by balancing on a surf board. Towards the end of the narrative, an extract of the Greek song from the eponymous film “Edge of Night” in which Kapaj’s voice was used as stand in for an Albanian immigrant intercepts the film. The narration becomes more fragmented as Kapaj tries to recall his journey through the mountains, mentioning cities, rivers and the geological topography of the landscape he passes. As he sculpts the mountain range, peaks, crevices and gorges, he effectively reconstructs the landscape and history of his passage. The title of the work is borrowed from the chapter ‘Mountains Come First’ from Braudel’s “Mediterranean” where Braudel points out that less research has been carried out on mountains due to their lack of an agricultural economy. However the mountains that circumscribe the Mediterranean are the embodiment of the passages through, over time.

GAMEKEEPERS
(BAUHAUS DESSAU 2021)

EXHIBITION at HAUS GROPIUS 

Sofia Dona, Mara Genschel and Andrea Acosta
Gropius House || Fictional
July 8–November 14, 2021

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/407046/sofia-dona-mara-genschel-and-andrea-acostagropius-house-fictional/

Under the title Gropius House || Fictional, the new exhibition of the Bauhaus Residence will be shown from July 8 to November 14, 2021 in the directors’ house of the Meisterhaussiedlung in Dessau. Over the past weeks and months, the artists Sofia Dona and Andrea Acosta as well as the writer Mara Genschel have dealt intensively with the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Masters’ Houses in Dessau from the perspective of infrastructures, the annual theme of the Bauhaus Dessau. The result is new, impressive works that bring the often hidden foundations of everyday life to light. In terms of content, they are devoted to the playful to brutal relationship between man and animal, the claimed mastery of the historical Bauhaus and the stones with which the master houses were once built.

The works by Sofia Dona and Mara Genschel can be seen at Gropius House until September 12, 2021, the work by Andrea Acosta until November 14, 2021.

#gamekepers #balancingnature #stadtjaeger #cityhunter #infrastructure #hausgropius #artistinresidence #bauhausdessaufoundation

MACHO SOUNDS / GENDER NOISE 
(STUTTGART 2020)
Sofia Dona & Daphne Dragona

STAATSGALERIE STUTTGART (21-26 July) / Die Irritierte Stadt Festival 
GEDOK-Galerie Stuttgart (9-31 October)

HANNSMANN-POETHEN LITERATURSTIPENDIUM 2020

photos by: Afroditi Festa, Matthias Fritsch, Staatsgallerie Stuttgart

Macho Sounds / Gender Noise explores how contemporary perceptions of gender are influenced by sounds designed and embedded in today’s technologies. Looking especially into the role of the automobile industry, the project takes as a starting point the artificially produced sounds of the conventional or electric cars of the present, and of the self-driving cars of the future. It discusses how vehicles –that would otherwise be silent– involve fake engine sounds to manifest their acceleration and power, and have artificial voices set by default as female to please and assist the driver.

The car, from the past until now, has been understood as a machine with a female body, offered to be ridden, possessed and controlled. This has produced a gendered iconography where women are objectified, but it has also given birth to a rich genealogy of powerful feminist resistance in relation to it. The project addresses the impact of patriarchal machines on the social construction of gender, and raises questions through feminist and queer perspectives: What will the voice and the engine of tomorrow’s car sound like, and who will be addressed? How can the stereotypes and prejudices reproduced through technologies be opposed? What does the car –as a powerful machine– stand for, in times of economic, societal and climate crisis? Which vehicles can drive us to messy and noisy places and worlds beyond binaries, hierarchies and categorisations?

The project is an an audiovisual installation combining video, sound and kinetic elements inspired by literature on cars, queer and feminist approaches on technology, as well as field work conducted in the city of Stuttgart. Motor mouths, artificial voices, human and machine written texts come together to expose and discuss the gendering of technologies on a symbolic and material level.

Credits

3-channel video installation
Camera: Sofia Dona
(29 min, color, full HD, stereo)
Performers: Anna Pangalou, Stavros and Ilias Grillis
Editing: Red Light Studio, Sofia Dona
Excerpts from the video [CAR ASMR] by Motline
https://youtu.be/fVUWkMA8eCg

Animated text
Text: Daphne Dragona
(12:23 min, color, full HD)
RNN generated text: Lukas Rehm
Animation: Matthias Fritsch

Kinetic Sculpture
Design: Sofia Dona
(Object from rubber, metal, plastic
overall dimensions: 43cm x 100cm 170cm)
Production: Lazaridis Studio

With our warmest thanks to Sofia Bempeza, Alexandros Bempezas, Jakob Berger, Evi Kalogiropoulou, Christine Fischer, Liz Flyntz, S-K-A-M e.V. (Joseph Michaels, Nikola Lutz, Arlette Probst), Matteo Pasquinelli, Thalia Raftopoulou, Eva-Maria Rembor, Christiane von Seebach, Renzo Vitale, Claudia Wronski, Lagios Recycle Cars, Tountas Garage.

ALTERNATIVE BRENNERO
(INNSBRUCK 2019)

VOYAGEURS SOLO EXHIBITION, TIROLER KÜNSTLER*SCHAFT

video installation, 9 monitors

The video installation consists of nine YouTube videos documenting people’s routes through various passes through the Alps, such as Simplon Pass, Gotthard Pass, Splügen Pass etc. In contrast to the impenetrable border of the Brenner pass, this work takes its title from an article in a tourist magazine presenting the beautiful alternative routes that one can take through the mountains, avoiding crossing through Brenner. The videos of the motocyclists are presented with the original music in a composition of nine monitors that reminiscent of a video game. 

VOYAGEURS site-specific video installation
(MUNICH 11.10 – 17.11.2019)

MAXIMILIANSFORUM 
https://www.maximiliansforum.de/de/archiv/archiv-detail/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=336&cHash=87d16f387b085db6a450557daacd150f

Opening:
10.10.19   7pm

20 Jahre Lange Nacht der Münchner Museen 2019:
Saturday, 19.10   7-11pm
Artist Talk with Sofia Dona and Mathieu Wellner
https://www.muenchner.de/museumsnacht/

The site-specific video installation ‘Voyageursʼ brings inside the underground passage of MaximiliansForum four videos that capture the moment of the release of thousands of pigeons during a pigeon race. Shot in the border between Germany and Poland, the liberation of the pigeons out of the truck and in the sky contradicts the underground space of the passage. Pigeon racing is the sport of releasing specially trained racing pigeons, which then return to their homes over a carefully measured distance. It is taking place in various countries around the world, either as a hobby or as a competition. A specific breed of pigeon called the ‘Racing Homerʼ enhanced with ‘homing instinctʼ is able to fly for hours navigating in response to variability in the earthʼs magnetic field, and to find its way home from great distances. Racing pigeons are transported to other countries in special modified trucks. There, they are released all together from the trucks, and start their voyage back home.
‘Voyageursʼ talks about crossing borders, seeking alternative routes, arrival and deportation and forcible journeys.

VOYAGEURS solo exhibition
(INNSBRUCK 06.09 – 09.11.2019)

KUNSTPAVILLON, TIROLER KÜNSTLER*SCHAFT
https://www.kuenstlerschaft.at/presse/pressematerial-voyageurs-sofia-dona-2/

Premierentage 2019 Saturday, November 9, 2019
Finissage from 11.00 – 17.00
Artist Talk at 13.00 with Andrei Siclodi
https://www.premierentage.at

In her exhibition Voyageurs Sofia Dona explores physical, geographical and environmental landscapes in order to reconnect them with social and political ones. Bird flights, border crossings, alternative paths through mountains and highways are presented with the aim of providing a differ­ent understanding of arrivals, deportations and forced journeys.

Voyageurs
a text by Ingeborg Erhart

When entering the Kunstpavillon, a truck or a swarm of doves appear to come towards one in the central viewing axis. The path to the video work filling the rear area is blocked by a sculptural intervention constructed like a house of cards from white marble slabs.
In her exhibition Voyageurs, Greek artist and architect Sofia Dona, trained in Athens and Weimar, examines physical, geographical and ecological landscapes in order to link them to the social and the political. The video installation of the same name shows a truck standing in the middle of flat country; soon 3,000 pigeons rise into the air from both sides of its loading area. Played in slow motion, the moment of release is extended, even celebrated. The birds are homing pigeons–one breed actually bears the name “voyageurs”, travellers–, which are often released hundreds of kilometres away from their lofts and whose owners, mostly older men, wait at home for the animals to return. The ability to find home is amazing: like migratory birds, the pigeons orient themselves according to the earth’s magnetic field. They are only able to return to the place where they were raised. National borders are often crossed in pigeon racing, but mountains and the sea cannot be found on the racing circuits. The risk of losing a lot of birds would be too high considering their price and the starting fees for races. The video was taken near the German-Polish border town of Tantow. The destination of the homing pigeons is Hamburg, about 290 km away as the crow flies. On a small screen, the work Racing Homers can also be seen in the darkened back area. In close-up and even more slowly than in Voyageurs, pigeons can be seen leaving the special truck. Under their wings some of the birds have coloured markings, so that the owners can recognize them as theirs from a distance. The sound produced by the flapping of the birds’ wings is almost like an explosion. The “Racing Homer” is a modern racing pigeon breed that arrives home especially quickly. The fact that the ancient poet Homer–to whom the Odyssey, the famous story of Odysseus’ travels is attributed–appears in the breed’s name is an association that Sofia Dona picks up and at the same time, this clarifies her approach: a combination of scientific research and personal experience and ideas, as well as opening up metaphorical levels. The black-and-white photograph Bird Traps, which the artist took on the small Greek island of Mathraki and which is presented in semi-darkness along with Voyagers and Racing Homers, also indicates this method. The dramatic ambivalence of the nets stretched between trees, without the knowledge that the island is inhabited by only 30 people and looks back on a long history of emigration, is immediately perceptible to the viewers.
The abstract, almost modernist seeming marble structure entitled Pigeon House in the entrance area closes or opens the narrative around the birds that were formerly bred as farm animals and are mainly used for leisure purposes today. On the Cyclades island of Tinos, pigeons have been bred since the 13^th century–on the one hand for their meat, and on the other because their excrement is used as a fertilizer. About 1000 pigeon houses, built in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, are still preserved. The typical triangular entrances and exits to the nests mean that they constitute an architectural peculiarity. Since marble is also mined on Tinos and the marble experts and craftsmen are widely known, the artist created Pigeon House together with a sculptor on Tinos.
Less poetic, indeed reminiscent of a video game, is the installation Alternative Brennero in the side wing of the exhibition space. On nine different monitors arranged in a cloud formation, it shows films of private individuals crossing the Alps on motorcycles, the footage having been found on YouTube. What the amateurs record with cameras mounted on helmets or handlebars and share on the Net, in part accompanied by music, are documents of pure driving pleasure. Pass roads are “conquered” without being tied to a specific purpose. The weather does not always play along. The title Alternative Brennero is borrowed from the lead story of an article in a tourist magazine reporting on particularly beautiful routes and north-south connections off the main Brenner route. The fact that the Brenner is not an alternative for everyone, especially not for those fleeing from the south to the north, quickly springs to mind and resonates in the title as much as the transit issue.
A black-and-white photograph in the same area of the Kunstpavillon is an enlargement of an historical photograph of today’s A8 motorway from Munich, southbound to the Austrian border. Faux Plat is what Sofia Dona calls the blow-up of a photo from the archive of landscape architect Alwin Seifert, who planned the so-called “Reichsautobahn” during the Nazi era. “Faux-plat” (French: slightly ascending) is a technical term in landscape architecture that describes a trick used to make a gradient appear flat, for example by using elongated curves. The former Reichsautobahn nestles, gently curving, into the Bavarian foothills of the Alps and does not take the direct route over long stretches–not only to prevent excessive steepness. It was a matter of aesthetic considerations–a picturesque view of the Alps could and still can be assured in this way.
As in the mural work Liberations and Arrivals, in which Sofia Dona traces the flight paths of the Central European competitions run in July 2019 by the pigeon racing federation P.I.P.A. (Pigeon Paradise) using nails and taut threads, the narratives often merely suggested and thus evoked in the imagination of the recipients of Voyageurs condense into a dense net. Bird flights, border crossings, alternative routes over mountains and motorways are presented in order to convey a different understanding of arrival, deportation and (in)voluntary travel.                                                                        Ingeborg Erhart

APPLAUS
(MUNICH 11.05 – 11.06.2019)

CITY OF MUNICH’S PUBLIC ART PROGRAMME ‘FREQUENCIES: Acoustic dimensions of the city’:
https://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/Stadtverwaltung/Kulturreferat/Bildende-Kunst/Kunst-im-oeffentlichen-Raum/Frequenzen.html

Site-specific installation
Munich Main Railway Station – Starnberg Wing Station

audio loop, sound system with eight loudspeakers, metal plaque, posters

The site-specific sound installation re-echoed the applause that greeted refugee’s arrival in 2015 and GDR migrants arrival in 1989, both at the Starnberg Wing Station of the Munich Hbf. The project APPLAUS focused on rethinking the act of the ‘applause’ taking under consideration the political situation nowadays, the rise of the extreme right wing and the deportations that have already taken place. How can we perceive this applause today? The  installation suggested to re-experience the welcoming incident at a moment that the Munich MainTrain Station is being demolished waiting for the new building to take its place. A metal plaque that forms part of the installation will remain at the building of the Starnberg Wing, until its demolition.

Project funded by the City of Munich Department of Arts and Culture
With the kind support of Deutsche Bahn

Sound design by Claudia Wroński
Sound system installation by Galli & Schmidt
Introductory text by Gürsoy Doğtaş
Project texts overseen by Kyriacos Karseras
Graphic design by Fake Office

ARTIST’S TALK
22.05.2019 – 18:30
Sofia Dona in conversation with author and cultural scholar Gürsoy Doğtaş

Special thanks to Giorgia Aquilar, Katja Aßmann, Andrea Binke, Babylonia Constantinides, the Bavarian Refugee Council, Sofia Bempeza, Jakob Berger, Stella Chronopoulou, Afroditi Festa, Ralf Homann, Martin Klemp & the Auer Weber architectural office, Leonidas Kourmadas, Yorgos Kourmadas, Dimitrij Lakatos, Anja Lückenkemper, Markus Galli, the Migrant’s Advisory Board Munich, the Munich Refugee Council, the Munich Volunteers – We Help Association, Refugees Welcome to Munich (YouTube account), Natalia Santori, Claudia Schnopp, Nathalie Schönberger, Vassiliea Stylianidou, Camille Tricaud, Franz Wanner and Sophie Wolfrum, and to my 2016 master’s programme students at the Technical University of Munich for first bringing the 1989 arrival of GDR internal migrants at the Starnberg Wing Station to my attention.

Encore

A text by Gürsoy Doğtaş

Those who flee seek to be as quiet as possible. Refugees do not want to draw attention. They often bide their time silently in hiding to avoid life-threatening danger. A loud round of applause – a radical acoustic gesture – marked the end of their flight in September 2015. People from Munich, who had gathered behind barriers in the Starnberg Wing Station of the city’s Hauptbahnhof (main railway station), applauded the refugees arriving from Syria and Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. Years earlier, similar scenes unfolded at the same location under very different historical circumstances. In November 1989, citizens of East Germany (the GDR) were also welcomed with applause.
Clapping hands – a wordless gesture easily understood by all – greeted the refugees and internal migrants, congratulating them on their survival and welcoming them as potential new fellow residents of Munich. This applause cast them as heroic athletes or adored actors. But with their ovations, audiences are always also celebrating themselves: in the case of September 2015 and November 1989, as an empathetic, cosmopolitan and tolerant society. The euphoric mood was later to subside, this culture of welcome gradually morphing into fear and rejection.
Munich-based artist and architect Sofia Dona isolated audio of this applause from video recordings of the events and arranged it in a loop to be used in her site-specific sound installation APPLAUS. Eight loudspeakers re-echo these outbursts of enthusiasm around the main hall and portico of the Starnberg Wing Station. APPLAUS does not restage specific scenes of some bygone welcoming culture but rather traces the imprint – the acoustic contour – of an absent event. The installation lets the recollective presence of a past resonate anew, creating a web of auditory connections between time, space and bodies.
Like an acoustic archaeology of historical events, APPLAUS excavates two historical layers of auditory space just a few years before this controversial piece of monumental neoclassical post-war architecture – designed by Heinrich Gerbl and protected as a listed monument since 2010 – is set to be demolished to make way for a new building. The swelling volume of the clapping hands, the rhythm and tempo of those events, acoustically pervade the architectural space as in an echo chamber. The expressive qualities of the station as a performance space are also simultaneously put to the test. Whereas the applause was originally for the refugees and internal migrants, APPLAUS reverses its direction: it is now passers-by who are acclaimed by clapping hands, as if they are performers.
Applause usually heightens a joy that is already there, drowning out all other moods. APPLAUS, on the other hand, has us prick up our ears when the applause dies away. Voices that are silent or weak, that go unheard, are thus brought into the public arena. Sofia Dona’s sound intervention examines both the threats and the exclusionary mechanisms posed by a narrowing urban and national populace and their conceptions of identity. Her audio loop seeks to slip the silenced stories of migrants and refugees back into the public discourse. APPLAUS defends voices dismissed as mere noise and demands their “place in the symbolic order of the community of speaking beings”. 1

1 Jacques Rancière, 1999, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy
(translated by Julie Rose). Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 25.

A plaque commemorating the refugees of 2015 and internal migrants of 1989 will be installed inside the Starnberg Wing Station as part of APPLAUS.

Sofia Dona’s project will also be complemented by posters pasted onto advertising pillars throughout Munich, thus transporting the events of both November 1989 and September 2015 deep into the city, and establishing a link back to the wing station set to disappear during the course of ongoing redevelopment works.

ENTMIETUNG / RENOVICTIONS,  SOLO EXHIBITION
(MUNICH 2018)

ARCHITEKTURGALERIE MÜNCHEN, July 23 – August 11, 2018

https://www.architekturgalerie-muenchen.de/en/current/detail/news/detail/News/entmietung.html

The summer exhibition at the Architekturgalerie München is dedicated to Sofia Dona, this year’s prizewinner of the City of Munich young talents award, whose work ranges between architecture and art. Sofia Dona shows a series of video projections and photographs that are part of her site-specific installations, as well as her new work ENTMIETUNG.

The work of Sofia Dona deals with social, economic and political questions through site-specific works. Whether focusing on the border area between Mexico and the USA, her native city Athens, Munich, Leipzig or Detroit, Dona creates installations and video works that distort established understandings of everyday life. She examines phenomena of eviction, deals with architectural symbols of power, looks at historical situations and stories from a different perspective to reveal hidden, forgotten or unnoticed elements. An important part of her artistic practice is the creation of an defamiliarising effect that produces both revealing and poetic works.

“The acts of doubling (the balcony in Der Balkon), displacing (the streetlight in Lighting-Up Time), and enlarging (the door in La Puerta De Las Californias) turn familiar objects into unexpected elements of a narrative. Undergoing processes of defamiliarisation, estrangement, ostranenie, the altered artifacts become capable of revealing stories and meanings, reenacting memories and raising awareness, through the exceptional ordinariness of simulacra.” “Defamiliarisation as Architectural Practice” Architectural Review, Sofia Dona & Giorgia Aquilar, Ark, 2/2018

WINTERSCHLAF / HIBERNATION (MUNICH 2018)

CITY OF MUNICH PRIZE FOR ARCHITECTURE 
(Förderpreise der Landeshauptstadt München, 2018)

LOTHRINGER HALLE 13
Süddeutsche Zeitung

suspended fountain cover 
Material: wood, wires 
Dimensions: 2m x 2m x 2m

WINTERSCHLAF opens up, transports and presents one of the winter fountain covers of Munich, in suspension. Covering the water for winter time, these wooden structures protect the foun- tain materials from cracking or braking in case of frost. Inside the gallery space, the structure is highlighted as the fountain is absent. Gärtnerplatz, one of the most vibrant public spaces in the city, is uncovered in advance opening up for the beginning of the new season, while the others still stay in sleep. WINTERSCHLAF is questioning the decorative fountains as pieces of architecture in the city, their history, their use to capture and hold precious drinking water, and how they have been forming spaces of encounter. WINTERSCHLAF refers to the things that remain hidden and uncritical, covered by the thick snow.