The live radio performance PARADISELOST VII FIRMAMENT is inspired by the experiences what Dimitra Pemousi and Manolis Manousakis accumulated by living in Athens during the last elections this past June. Through a series of interviews taken from April to the end of the summer it became obvious that the economic and political crisis in Greece would be their main thematic.
Editing the interviews and dividing the material in chapters they created a parallel story to Milton’s. Their episodes (like in Milton’s work) are divided in 12 chapters; each chapter is inspired by a unique character that is found in the original work. Finally they substituted the original characters, such as Satan, God, Jesus and the angels, with people they interviewed at the streets of Athens and audio samples taken from TV political talk shows.
The audio samples are taken from a series of interviews questioning a random selection of people . The questions are inspired by Paradise Lost. The interviewer asked, amongst other questions; have you found your paradise? Is there a paradise? Do you think we live in paradise ? Although these questions are clichés, the political situation between 2009-2012 in Greece and the results of the economic crisis, which greatly affected the lives of most Greek residents, lead to answers that where characterized by their statements against the political regime and the high-class nomenclature. The final result was a plethora of answers that where relayed to the project .
Also a series of recorded soundscapes at open-air political speeches, radio talks, tv political talk shows, rallies and protests consist of an audio mosaic serving as a background that transforms the action from chapter to chapter. The same way work the voice improvisations by Savina Yannatou. Inspired directly from Milton’s text, they were made into songs with a voice lyricism that resembles Paradise or Hell.