Two crows, La Durée and Lo Dérive begin a corvidspondence across the ruins.

Four-Second Decay, founded by Matthew Fink and P. A. Skantze, is a performance group made of two that can expand to four, six, eight and on depending on the project and the collaborators. The group has performed internationally for 15 years.

Letters between two crows long acquainted as they muse upon the state of roadkill, veganism, cross species curiosities, Schubert and sonnets.

Matthew Fink is a poet, photographer, and artist. His book of poems afterKleist was published by selva oscura press in 2018 [https://hyperallergic.com/572372/afterkleist-by-matthew-fink/]. His forthcoming book of poems, The Tattered Canopy of the Velodrome, is about war and petroleum. After the Smash: the Humpty Notebooks a chamber opera project with Four-Second Decay was performed in London in 2016. N.Orleans a video project with photographs and text by Fink and video by Julio Velasco was an official selection for the Cologne Off IV festival (coff.newmediafest.org).

P. A. Skantze is a theatre director, writer and composer working in Italy and London. Reader in Performance Practices at Roehampton University, Skantze is the author of Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (Routledge 2003) and Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle (Punctum 2013) as well as articles on creative practice, articles practicing creatively, and articles on sound, black critical studies, the Undercommons and gender. She is working on a New York production of her musical STACKS, an opera libretto based on Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books, and following her staged textual interventions for the opera Falstaff at the National Theatre of Croatia in 2018 she is creating a performance that moves between spoken play and sung opera, Scoring Macbeth, at the National Theatre of Croatia in 2021.

Four Second Decay understands its work in a long line of practitioner researchers from Sappho and Shakespeare to Lorraine O’Grady and Bill T. Jones. Site-specific work includes two pieces made for Athens, Greece Green Park [https://greenparkathens.wordpress.com/september-october-2015/] A free clinic by ‘The Centre for the Healing of Institutional Misery’ located in the balcony of the Café and in 2016 ‘Orfeo and Eurydice: How to Save Someone You Can’t See/Orfeo and Eurydice: Redistricting Hell’ a site-specific work in the park itself with G4S guards guarding Hell – in recognition of the Park as a refuge for those newly arrived and living on the streets of Athens.

Francesco Borromini, Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, Rome (1640–50) 

Erich Mendelsohn’s The Einstein Tower, Potsdam (1919-21). 

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: on Poetry and Finance (Semiotexte, 2012).

(Fink Inspirations)

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study http://www.tenstakonsthall.se/uploads/141-The_Undercommons_Harney_Moten.pdf 

Daphne Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: the Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2021).

U.S. Theatre Director Peter Sellars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GD0BxzesTk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRDKPkv5o8E

(Skantze Inspirations)