The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures

ABSTRACT This article offers a reflection on the authors’ curation of (Dousos and Ieropoulos) and participation in (de Senna and Pfützenreuter) The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures, a performance festival that took place at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2018. Dousos and Ieropoulos present their thoughts around the need to curate such an event in the first place, discussing the context within which they operate, the Athenian art scene, while making the case that ambiguity as a political and poetical tool must not be surrendered to the right. De Senna and Pfützenreuter discuss their experiences in creating and performing right-wing personas that blur the lines between what is real and what is performed; engaging in strategies of overidentification, they initiate a discussion around the ethics and role of critical artistic practice in response to contemporary right-wing radicalisation and aesthetics. Mirroring the curatorially experimental nature of the festival, the contributors speak from multiple positionalities. As such, the structure and tone of the article attempt a destabilisation of the form of a conventional academic paper, avoiding an overall, singular summing-up of the positions presented, and allowing for shifts in register.