Nikos Branidis, Tim Goodwyn, Kala Mari, Billy MacKinnon, Mikeda, Luis Karl Börje

Nikos Branidis

My contribution: a sound performance rehearsal, a garland garnishing that monster of a building, a reading of a poem, Heidegger’s eggs, written by Lennox Raphael, who I met in 2021 in an art festival in Copenhagen and one more of one my many own untitled poems. Two days and two nights in that beast’s stomach, several more visits inspecting its guts and ghosts. Lennox writes: Memories, ruins/ carved headstones, mosquito bones/ obsessions, emissions/ territorial obligations, savage spells/ once upon a time, kisses imagined/ Royal jelly, …lip to lip/ again & again, eye reflections of pain/ nurture souls of manufacture found & bound/ spring September sunlit December, considerate fate/ DELIVERANCE/ dreams at least, the designated beast/ wanted, flaunted, haunted/ O, Memories of Rubbish…

Tim Goodwyn

I rarely have a conscious subject matter. For me, it’s more about using collage and giving a general mood or impression using surreal lines or joining lines that don’t quite make sense. Weird lines and colourful imagery, sometimes bleak or threatening, sometimes innocent and warm. I don’t look for rhyme or tempo but if it happens then that’s great.

I like the part

“Keeping hooligans at bay for just ten pence piece

They fill themselves with pink tracksuits and give their love away”

Looking at my visual artwork you could perhaps see the poetry was made by the same artist which I found interesting and I’m probably coming from a more spoken word hip hop background think Dr Octagon.

Kala Mari

Kala Mari is an environmental scientist and sci-fi writer, who participated in Supersport for the first time this year after accidentally falling into Kifisos river, running adjacent to the Psiloritis building. Here’s an extract of what she wrote: “It was an uncertain step of an uncertain mind that made me slip. As I was falling and could feel my shoe already wet, I tried shoving my tree branch in the river bottom for support, but it turned out it was deeper than I thought and in I fell in. I fell lightly and found myself neck high. The water was cool, the current light and for a moment the river embraced me. Immediately I thought about my phone and climbed out. I took my clothes off and started laughing wildly. I couldn’t stop laughing. What a wonderful metaphor for a breakdown.”

Billy MacKinnon

Abandoned factory, abandoned works toilet. Inside there, three scrubbed-clean, white ceramic urinals, each tall as a man. And at the base of each, a nest of bright candlelight. Brilliant. Why does Meret Oppenheim (fur coffee cup) spring to mind? Or that guy (forget his name) and some pronouncement about chance encounters, sewing machines, umbrellas, dissecting tables.

Toilet. Perfect reading venue. Brilliant acoustics. Three pissoirs, the candles, the surrounding dark; fittingly – three sacred, shining altars, a trinity, a summoning, an unworldly presence.

Tim, he loves poetry but is uncomfortable with it. But he has brought some work which is more to his taste – his own. This would also be his first ever public reading, if at all, and we stand at the bar and I bully him to give it a try. Platitudes like, “It’s essential to hear your words in someone else’s ears, etc…” Fact is, I needn’t have bothered, and he reads, clear and confident, exceptionally well.

I kick off with a piece from four or five years back:

‘Fucking artists/ no sense/ we do what we do/ a door slams in a wind/ of some foreign place/ and we set up home in this house of cards… my face/ a question mark/ yours/ an exclamation mark… and the ink got everywhere…

Which pretty much says it. My life in Athens.

After midnight. We seem to be the last to leave, Maria, Niκos and I. No question of lights out, there are none, only our mobile phones. Rubble and potholes. In the dark, I stumble and graze my knee. Which jolts my memory. Oh yeah – the sewing machine guy, Lautreamont (1868, died age 24), godfather of surrealism. And we might say, surely it’s had its day, this surrealism. A public john by candlelight. And we might say: has it?

Luis Karl Börje