Microscope is very pleased to present “8 Things to be Scared of Instead of Death,” an approximately 40-minute online performance by Erica Scourti live-streamed from Greece. The piece incorporates a live performative reading by the artist accompanied by imagery from her new video of the same title. The video, made during the pandemic and completed in May of this year, addresses themes of “love, labor, and acedia,” the latter of which can be seen as a predecessor of depression and as one of the 8 original sins (sloth).

The video is assembled from numerous video diaries the artist recorded with her iPhone over 18 months starting in the summer of 2019 to form autobiographical narratives. Scourti used text transcription software to transcribe the original video footage, which included over 80,000 spoken words, from which she then composed a “long-form, essayistic monologue collage.” In this work Scourti’s text-driven video making, contrary to more traditional forms, is determined and shaped by syntax and the spoken word, often resulting in abrupt cuts and space-time leaps.

“Slipping between English and Greek, auto-transcription and translation, the event explores my interests in rhythm, voice and the re-assembling of fragmented speech in the writing of ‘impersonal’ autobiographical narratives that connect the personal and collective.” — ES

The performance will be immediately followed by a Q&A with the artist and the audience via live chat. The video “8 Things to be Scared of Instead of Death,” will also be viewable on the same page as the live performance. Both will remain on view through Thursday July 22nd, 11:30pm PT.

TO WATCH:

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Passes for viewing give full access to video introduction, live performance, video program, and live Q&A.

General admission $8 (Valid through Thursday July 22, 11pm PT)
Member admission $6 (Valid through Thursday July 22, 11pm PT)

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Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, born in Athens and now based in London and Athens. Embracing contingency, humour and lo-fi media, her work explores affect, work and the performance and representation of subjectivity, often reprocessing archives of everyday life in an open-ended project of collective and self-narration and consumption. Recent solo shows include Chief Complaint at Almanac, London and Spill Sections at StudioRCA (both 2018); her work has been presented at the High Line, New York, Wellcome Collection, Kunsthalle Wien, Hayward Gallery, Munich Kunstverein, EMST Athens and South London Gallery and she has performed at the ICA, Wysing Festival and Tramway amongst many other venues. Her writing has been published in Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota Press, 2018) Fiction as Method (2017, Sternberg) Documents of Contemporary Art: Information (2016, MIT Press) amongst others. Scourti was guest editor of the Happy Hypocrite journal (2019) and was a resident at Rupert, Lithuania, in summer 2019.

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Microscope’s Event Series 2021 is sponsored by Re:Voir, a home video label for classic and contemporary experimental film in Paris, France.