I insist on capitalizing Companionship, while for loneliness I use a lower-case “l”.And yet, loneliness is not at all lowly or mundane. Perhaps in doing so I cast it out, this heinous circumstance. But then again isn’t companionship also an illness?

And what if these two words are not antonyms of each other? What if the two ideas don’t have – or need – antonyms at all?

They stand alone because they are absolute. Like tongues that lick, like chains that clench.

The dialogue between the works of Olga Evangelidou and Konstantina Katrakazou, in the context of Unpleasant Emo- tional Response (Τρικυμία) sheds light on two different sides of the situation, or better yet on two different situations that successively entail one another. Loneliness, absence and loss, companionship, presence and love. Examining these different situations as conditions of one’s inner nature we keep returning to the same symptoms, the same causes and the same patients. If the bug is analysed, then it becomes clear that what we are dealing with is an organism facing its mirror, a disease the outcomes of which might be fatal or a disease that might cure itself, a condition without a ‘’patient zero’’. Companionship follows a course that is different from the one of loneliness; as the first moves from the surface towards the interior, the second one is born in the depths and only gradually surfaces.The one forms the other’s reme- dy and reason for existing, participating in an everlasting game of mutual extermination.

Through two installation works and five concurrent monologues, Evangelidou and Katrakazou investigate the condition without offering treatments.

Unpleasant emotional response (Τρικυμία) is presented in the context of the publication of the fourth issue of Asthenia zine.