Pytheas Travels

15-16 September 2023, Ultima - Oslo Contemporary Music Festival at Sentralen, Oslo Norway.

13-14-15 October 2023, Onassis Stegi, main stage, Athens Greece.

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Do you find it hard to float through life? Do you feel tangled in the nets of your daily routine and seek escape? Embark on one of the state-of-the-art vessels of Pytheas Travels cruise fleet

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Pytheas Travels is an immersive audiovisual performance exploring the socio-environmental impacts of overtourism through a maritime fantasy that oscillates between myth, simulation, and satire. Named after the ancient Greek navigator Pytheas—who sailed from the Mediterranean to the mythical Ultima Thule in 325 BC—this contemporary journey reimagines the explorer’s route as a luxurious cruise into ecological and cultural oblivion.

In a time when the climate crisis is accelerating, when the privilege of global mobility is more uneven than ever, and when the appetite for leisure continues to devour landscapes and cultures, Pytheas Travels arrives as both mirror and rupture. The project uses the familiar language of the cruise—a symbol of luxury, freedom, and escape—to expose its paradoxes and underlying costs.

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At once a musical voyage and an audiovisual critique, Pytheas Travels with a video score composed of live-action footage, hand-drawn, digital and claymation animation, green-screen interventions, and scenes filmed in Greece and Norway. The narrative unfolds in an extravagant cruise vessel drifting between historical memory and contemporary dystopia.

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The cruise ship becomes a condensed theatre of global extractivism: an ephemeral city that consumes vast resources while isolating itself from the reality it traverses.By embedding absurdity and dissonance into its visual and sonic architecture, the project defamiliarizes the mechanisms of leisure.

The video score incorporates layered references, marine landscapes and digitally constructed port and island stops that fracture narrative continuity with an accumulation of symbols, thresholds, and interruptions. Alongside decadent parties and luxury banquets, the work evokes haunting imagery of a fire, riot, drifting plastic, and a group of AI convening in the “belly of the whale”. The ocean is ever-present: as connector and divider, as surface and abyss.

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With a soundscape by pioneering Norwegian composer Maja S. K. Ratkje—known for her raw vocal explorations and hybrid compositional language—the work becomes an disorienting, visceral, and intimate aural journey as well.  Featuring live performances and studio recordings of four musicians from "Ergon Ensemble" and four musicians of "Tøyen Fil og Klafferi" who also perform live aboard the bar of this speculative cruise ship. Their performances are interwined with sonifications of data from the diurnal migration of marine organisms, the human DNA and recordings of marine mammals of the North Sea.

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Duration : 60 min.

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Stage photos: Andreas Simopoulos