Foivos Dousos
Crew
Biography
Foivos Dousos completed his PhD on narcissism in new media cultures in 2019. He was a contributing curator for the Athens Biennale and a founding member of Sound Acts Festival, the Athens Museum of Queer Arts (AMOQA) and the publishing initiative Queer Ink. In his creative practice as part of the artistic duo FYTA, he has performed in Athens, Geneva, Berlin and London. FYTA's work problematizes Greek identity and nationalism and often employs playfulness, humour and irony. In 2020, FYTA were commissioned by the Greek National Opera to present a queer adaptation of Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. This work, initially conceived as a staged opera, was later turned into a film (ORFEAS2021) which premiered at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in 2021. ORFEAS2021 was screened in film festival, art spaces and queer events in Toronto, Rotterdam, Berlin, Boston, Copenhagen, Stockholm and others. In 2023, Foivos was involved in the making of the upcoming documentary 'Avant Drag!' as producer and writer. The film will premier in early 2024 and it focuses on the thriving experimental drag scene of Athens.
Known For
A psychedelic docu-essay, inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s visionary poem Une Saison en Enfer, in which the poet’s ghost travels through history, encountering revolutionary figures and queer ‘freaks’ such as Emma Goldman, David Wojnarowicz, and Marsha P. Johnson. These encounters form a multilayered collage that interrogates identity, the meaning of revolution, and the role of the artist in shaping radical histories and collective imaginaries.
Uchronia
Two newly dead young people meet in the streets of Athens, amid the pulsing cityscape and the ghosts of history. One a translator, the other a photographer, they were outsiders in life; in death they struggle with the residue of their longings and mistakes. They wander the city together, finding consolation in the difficult beauty of existence and its aftermath.
How to Shoot a Ghost
Avant-Drag! paints portraits of ten drag artists of varying gender expressions and sexualities who take to the streets of Athens to query, problematise and (yes, please!) undermine social strictures. Employing wildly imagined personas – like riot housewives and Albanian turbo-folk girls – who perform acts as revolutionary as praising abortion and as charming as drawing childish pictures, these artists call for social justice by taking aim at conservatism, patriarchy, patriotism, racism and sexism.
Avant-Drag!
A retro-futurist story of utopian politics, ideological conflicts, supernatural leaders and totalitarian spectacle. Cyberpunk queer pirates against rainbow homo-capitalist normies. Revolution vs reformism; logic vs affect. The trappings of post-internet identity politics through a contemporary take of the myth of Orpheus.
Orfeas2021
Golfe is an adaptation of the 19th-century bucolic idyll of Golfo and the eponymous first silent feature film of Greek cinema in 1914. The film reimagines the classic late 19th-century greek drama in a 21st-century context rethinking the recent European economic and political crisis between Greece and Germany. The new story of Golfe highlights particular ideological traits that gained popularity within the indignation movement and parliamentary politics in Greece during the time of an imminent Grexit. The film employs elements of Esoteric Nazism, Perennialism, Eurasianism, and the Third-Rome doctrine to reflect on nationalism and the dark ideological intricacies of that period.
Golfe
FYTA become plants dressing up as people staging a theater play about plants. The mirroring of embodiment, fantasy and representation creates a series of surreal interactions where sexuality meets relaxation, impossible relationships find theatrical resolutions and an excursion to a deserted resort turns into post-human documentary on nature.