A special performative lecture with artist and writer Maria Christoforidou and exhibiting artist Lucy Stein. This event expanded on their ongoing conversations around esoteric culture, genius loci, and Jungian ideas of the anima/animus. Christoforidou and Stein borrow cues from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film Sympathy for the Devil and reference the myths of Iphigenia and Hecate as they moved in and around Stein’s Wet Room installation.

The performance was broadcast live via Instagram.

Maria Christoforidou

Maria Christoforidou is an Afro-Greek artist, writer and researcher. Her practice explores the political, physical and performative operations of words and images. She is motivated by a hope to create pauses that allow minor stories of sameness, voices, bodies and plant comrades to evade classification, come to rest, undoing unspeakable knots of otherness. She is an art history lecturer at Falmouth University and lives in Cornwall and Athens.

Lucy Stein

Lucy Stein (b. 1979) is based in St Just, Cornwall. She studied at The Glasgow School of Art, and later at De Ateliers, Amsterdam. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Thesmophoria (including the performance lecture Bride of Quiet), Galerie Gregor Staiger, Milan (2020); Digitalis Purpurea (a re-introspective), Conceptual Fine Arts , Milan (online) (2020); £10.66, Palette Terre, Paris (2018); Crying the Neck, NICC Brussels (with Nina Royle) (2017); On Celticity (organised with Paola Clerico), Rodeo Gallery, London (2016). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Futura, Prague (2020); Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (2019); Tate St Ives (2018); TULCA festival, Galway; Newlyn Gallery, Penzance (all 2017); Le Bourgeoise, London (2016); UKS Oslo (2015). In 2017 she co-organised Fuck you wheres my Suger, a two-day festival on themes of depression and hysteria at Cafe Oto in London with Mark Harwood. In 2016 she co-curated NEO-PAGAN BITCH-WITCH! at Evelyn Yard, London with France-Lise McGurn and in 2015 she organised the performance event The Wise Wound with Tate St Ives and Porthmeor Studios. Between November 2019 and May 2022, Stein and Sarah Hartnett are undertaking a pilgrimage along the Mary ley line, which runs from Carn Les Boel in Cornwall to Hopton in Norfolk.