Urban Vampire: A Rite of Passage : A threshold experience of a performative paper

Abstract

The Urban Vampire project emerged just before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in Athens and it has since engaged with the fragmented yet persistently undead urban space. Performative fragments focused specifically on transitional spaces within the urban landscape — the arcades [στοές] of downtown Athens — were assembled into the experimental short film Urban Vampire: A Rite of Passage, presented within the context of performative presentations at the Performing Space Conference 2025. The film’s core inquiry lies in revealing the bridging and connecting qualities of the arcades, both physically and metaphorically – the latter being the internal processes of initiation that unfold during the liminal passage from one point of public space to another — through the mystical quality that an arcade can hold. Drawing on psychogeography, autoethnography, performance writing and performance practice as its methodological framework, this article could have served as a written presentation of the theoretical background of the performative piece if a performative presentation itself had not already taken space at the conference. However, having performed the presentation, it is only fitting that this article continues that process and stands as another step within the research methodology — from a performance to performative presentation to performative paper.