Redefining the Change in Democracy: A Site-specific Deambulatory Performance in Sotiria Hospital’s Park

Abstract

The paper examines the site-specific performance Redefining the Change in Democracy in Sotiria Hospital’s park (Athens Epidaurus Festival 2024). Conceived as an artwork within an academic setting, the composition interrogates the intersection of care, health, and democratic structures within a historically charged institutional landscape. The argument is grounded in a theoretical framework that draws on ritual performance (van Gennep, 1960), spatial theory (Lefebvre, 1991; Foucault, 1986), and S.Bloch’s psychosomatic approach to affect. Positioned as practice-as-research (PaR), the project treats embodied methodologies as instruments of critical inquiry and pedagogy. It argues that such site-responsive compositions can reimagine public space and creative technique as liminal, affective, socially engaged encounters that exceed conventional performance boundaries, modelling a hybrid paradigm at once aesthetic, interdisciplinary, and civically oriented.

The article is structured into the following sections: the background and context of the performance, the methodological and theoretical framework of the creative work, and the conclusions that illuminate the outcomes of the research.