A band, an arts duo, and brothers of course (in life and on stage), the pair always work together, and always work with their friends, from Greece and beyond, as well as with their relatives. Weaving and embroidering their “flying carpets” are none other than their mother and aunt. And the Callasettes are none other than the women by their sides – their partners, associates, and friends. Their wide-ranging, multiform oeuvre has been presented in New York, London and Paris, as well as in Athens, on Hydra, and in their village – Thermissia – which lies across from the island, on the Peloponnesian coast. It’s there, at their family farm, that they host bacchanalian, communal arts gigs, like their recent 24-hour art event held on June 21, 2022 with the support of Onassis Culture, in anticipation of this Onassis Stegi exhibition.

Twenty years after first appearing on stage, The Callas (Aris and Lakis Ionas) encapsulate their polymorphic presence in the arts scene with “L.S.D.”: a retrospective exhibition/event series, taking place in the future and defined, conceptually and affectively, by the title “Love Solidarity Death (L.S.D.)”.

Founding figures of the Greek DIY scene, musicians, visual artists, performers, publishers, organizers of urban and rural festivals, filmmakers and video creators, welcoming hosts at their own spaces and restless explorers of other places and approaches, ever ingenious and versatilely faithful to a de-developmental artistic experience, standing in solidarity with counter-hegemonic collective practices, The Callas delve into the source materials of their co-animating actions.

They occupy Onassis Stegi with episodes drawn from an adventure that is resolute in its radical teachings of solidarity, its profligate forms of love, and the fragmentary, transformational psychedelia of death.

At the installations, events, mixes, and happenings of “L.S.D.” we will find, among other things, a largely unregistered archive of collective practices in Greece, as well as the kind of improvised communitarianism that emerged quietly and sensuously in the work of Ionas brothers. Thus, “L.S.D.” puts forth not only an open ecosystem of self-sufficiency, osmotic revisions, and ecstatic knowledge, but mostly a therapeutic, yet uneasy, speculative reality of cosmopolitics.

The sense of community and the frantic, constant birth of small temporary utopias as a weapon of resistance and survival, like continuous fragile bunkers of utopia, bubble shelters or chapels, Mother’s Embrace, our Female and Male Friends, the fragmentation and the mysteries of Heraclitus and E. Ch. Gonatas, In Lust We Trust as a muffled mantra and murmur, Superstudio and the Radical Italian Discos, the respect for the uniqueness of each tiny element over a grand Byzantine wall, the cut-up literary and film methods, the Domes, the psychedelic and anarchic architecture in Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” the sensual urban dystopia of J. G. Ballard, Sonic Youth along with Sotiria Bellou and Marika Papagika, the drug-fueled Plus Soda club next to Kerameikos area, a tripped-up N. G. Pentzikis, the sensual frottage of Cycladic architecture, the lo-fi and tender geometry of a post-punk song, the Working Class Madonnas next door, the muted energy of Giorgio Morandi, the day-to-day life poetry of Frank O’Hara, Cyriacus of Ancona’s acid Proto-Renaissance dérive in archaeological sites and the flânerie of the Situationists through their psychogeography, the Cypress trees abound and the First Cemetery of Athens as a garden/yard/smile of a Kouros or a Kore. The remaining uncovered 50 meters of Ilisos river and the dear Kalliroi, with its nymphs, the ancient streams flowing eternally, Saint Photini church, with parrots and frogs and an otherworldly nature in the heart of an urban landscape, with its cruising spot and the urban mythology of the hole-in-the-wall arcade (stoa).

It’s dawn, you are walking, hugging each other, hungover, over the slabs of Pikionis’ paths, and you sense fragments, thirst, ancient marbles, and Korai coexisting with plastic sewage pipes, cats and oleanders, and the sun always rising behind the crazy old Hymettus (you softly shut your eyes).

Love, Solidarity & Death

-The Callas / Lakis and Aris Ionas, November 2022