Interview with Olga Spyropoulou

Performance artist Olga Spyropoulou’s artwork Memory Collectors: online memory game, which engages with Mad House’s history and online archives, will be featured in Mad House Publication Volume 5, to be released in December 2024.

To organise our dissappointments (2021) performance by Olga Spyropoulou and Katriina Kettunen at Mad House Helsinki. Photo: Saara Autere

Anne Naukkarinen/Mad House: Mad House Helsinki is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, in 2024, marking a milestone worth reflecting on and celebrating. As I think about these past ten years, I’m thinking of all three venues (and other sites): starting at Suvilahti, moving to Teurastamo, spending a year as NoMad without one venue, and now residing in the House of Text. I imagine all the artists, audiences, producers, curators, technicians, members, collaborators and funders who have made this possible.

But I'm also reflecting on the challenges ahead, especially as we face the reality of financial cuts and how they may impact us and our community.

We invited you, both as a member and as an artist who has made performances at Mad House, to create a piece of art that reflects on and engages with the history of Mad House. This work will be featured in our upcoming online Publication Vol. 5 and presented at the launch on December 13th. Could you share with us how you are approaching this invitation of engaging with the history of MH?

Olga Spyropoulou: It’s funny how things and words slide, worlds and people stray. I received this invitation from you, already last year, through a phone call. We've had several meetings in the process of organising and discussing the work. We recently had a walk visiting the different locations where Mad House has resided. And just now, with this question, I realised that all this time I have been working around the idea of memory and not history and I wonder why - what performs differently in memory and in history? 

I can recount the steps of our meetings through our messages and probably formulate a historical account of our encounters. What happened during the encounters is documented through our notes, some notes we shared with each other, we put them in a document and we cross-checked them – let’s say, yet a lot stayed unwritten and “in the air”. We connected. Somewhere in that territory, with the certainty that what happened in you was disparate to what happened in me when we met and that something was shared, I find the memory of the encounters and the agency for fabulation.

What I am saying is, that in concepts there’s a built-in elasticity/fluidity and a built-in concreteness/sedimentation. Somehow there’s an outline of the borders of things and then no one knows how volatile the various thoughts can become inside them. For instance, there’s a consensus on what a stool is, and people know that within the stool there’s a chair, a table, an ass, and many other thoughts, but somehow those thoughts stop at the form of the stool. 

When I think of history, I also think of power and how the outline and definition of those borders are formed. When I think of memory, I think of collectivity and an expanded affordance of what and how many can exist there. When I think of cuts, I think of the knife as a tool for thinking and I have much preferred spoons in my life, meaning bringing together not dividing, seeing struggles as collective and not as individual. It is important at a time when the right of various populations to exist is constantly challenged, to remember, persist,  and defend what is important for our communities. 

So to come back to your question, I approach this invitation with a spoon in hand and the memory of my own questions from when I first encountered Mad House Helsinki. What is this concept called Mad House? What are its outlines and which are the thoughts contained? What is the form that captures it? What is the space where these thoughts stop for a moment? What is its place in the world?

Anne/MH: I agree that it’s funny how these two concepts have been swaying around. I think that writing a history is about power, as you mentioned also — what narrative is shared publicly and from whose perspective. However, in discussing this project with you, I’ve been thinking more about memory, particularly the collective memory within the Mad House community, and how it shapes the known and written history of MH, such as what is read and seen on MH’s webpage. What kinds of stories do artists, audiences, producers, curators, technicians, members, collaborators, and funders carry in their bodies about Mad House? What sort of history is built through oral stories, the "puskaradio"? What do we remember physically as gestures and movements, and what forms the private collection of photos on our phones?

Since you have some reflections from your first encounter with Mad House, I wonder what others might carry from their own experiences with MH.

Would you like to share how these reflections from that first encounter will shape the upcoming artwork in our online publication? What would you like readers or the audience of this work to experience?

Olga: There is an impossibility in the memory of these questions that I want to explore: the impossibility of revisiting something for the first time, thinking of something that feels familiar and precious, something which I feel that I know as “an unknown and strange thing”. I believe a path to this “wonderment” lies in being curious about all the definitions and experiences that Mad House holds, specifically what you mentioned above: the “private” stories that artists, audiences, producers, curators, technicians, members, collaborators, and funders tell about Mad House. How can I access that sphere? What are the contemporary depositories of lived experience that are available to me?

To that end, I am researching online archives (social media, artists portfolios, etc) for Mad House mentions. How does Mad House appear on that collective sphere? How is it remembered? As a performance maker who predominantly works within the format of participatory performance, I am inquiring into the success of those archives. Why are these online archives so attractive to users? What enhances their participatory potential? Why do users so willingly relinquish their rights to privacy and ownership of their memories to these platforms?

For the publication, I aim to create a work that invites participation and respects the participants’ agency over their memories – a work that explores memory as a living thing, a bodily sensation, and a dynamic process rooted in the present and pointing toward the future. A work grounded in the time that we exist and in a time that is distant enough to allow for a new outline of Mad House to emerge. How will Mad House exist in the future?

I want the work to become a host for stories and dreams, a place of uncanny feelings like nostalgia for the future. How do I invite the audience to participate in that space? How to make the encounter with the work enjoyable and meaningful? How to highlight the liveness and temporality of the medium of the online publication? How to explore memory as a live performance? How to bring out the potential of memory as a community-making mechanism, and to investigate the connection between memory, history and identity-making?

Perhaps by giving the audience a scoop of ice-cream in mid-December.