Βρόχινα ‘ρανοκατέβατ* / Rainfallen/ The Confluentials

Installation with video, sound, three text prints and a performance with the participation of the local community of Marpissa, Paros (GR).

In the exhibition “Marpisses VERAELIAKONSTANZAFRANCKLEE*”. 28, 29, 30 August 2026 as part of the Routes in Marpissa Festival 2026

The work titled Βρόχινα ´ρανοκατέβατ* /Rainfallen / The Confluentials comprises a poetic speculative narrative, a sound work, and a performance. These three elements are interwoven, allowing language, sound, and the body to operate as interconnected fields of narration.

Drawing material from the archive of oral histories created by the team of the festival Διαδροµές στη Μάρπησσα (Routes in Marpissa), the work departs from the contemporary reality of the island, where the intensification of tourism development violently transforms the landscape, the land, labour relations, and forms of collective life.

Within the framework of the speculative narrative, following a powerful storm on Paros, a collective of hybrid cyborg bodies emerges. These bodies are rain-born: condensations of water and heterogeneous materialities, traces of memory, traditional tools, and fragments from different temporalities. Their skin carries traces of human and geological strata, technological remnants, oral narratives, and future possibilities.

Their presence opens a rupture in the linear perception of time, through which the past, present, and future cease to be understood as distinct sequences. Instead, temporal flows emerge, converging and permeating one another, continuously transforming the possibilities of the present.

The work proposes a different approach to time: not as a neutral framework within which events unfold, but as a relation produced through the material, ecological, and political connections between bodies, places, and narratives. The future does not appear as a horizon; rather, it is reassembled as a space emerging from the entanglements and connections between what has already existed and what is still in the process of becoming.

The word ‚´ρανοκατέβατα‘ originates from Zacharias Stella’s book «Πάρος. Μύθια Παραµύθια κι άλλα λαογραφικά και γλωσσικά» (Paros. Myths, Tales and Other Folkloric and Linguistic Writings). The use of the asterisk in the word ‚´ρανοκατέβατ*‘ in the title of the work refers to an expanded linguistic practice developed within queer communities, where the removal of the gendered word ending functions as a way of moving beyond the gender binary and of embracing multiple gender identities.

In the context of the Greek language, the practice of dropping the final vowel is a familiar feature of many local dialects, functioning as an element of orality and linguistic economy. In this way, a traditional local linguistic practice enters into dialogue with a contemporary queer politics of language.

The concept of confluential derives from the work of Antonio Bispo dos Santos, a Brazilian Quilombola thinker and activist, and constitutes a central concept in his anti-colonial thought. Confluential describes the coming together of different forms of knowledge and cultures that flow alongside one another and remain in dialogue, without relations of domination that would lead to a single, homogeneous form of fusion.

Text/ Sound design: Franck-Lee Alli-Tis
Performative vocals: Ayse Orhon, Franck-Lee Alli-Tis
Mixing: Yiannis Loukos, Franck-Lee Alli-Tis
Tουμπάκι: Sofia Kefala
Recording of Μπάλος
from the archive Nikos Tsantanis
https://blueheritage.gr/h-tsampouna-sthn-paro/
Τζαμπούνα: Theodoros Kalogerakis
Tουμπάκι: Nikos Tsantanis
Field recording of hives (2023): Dimitris Karageorgos
Choreography / Dance: Melina Koutava
Performer: Melina Koutava, Afrodite Afentaki, Roussa Agourou, Eleni Tsigonia