ART. As I continue to grow as an Artist, Researcher, Teacher I tend to find synonyms in order to reposition myself. Sometimes I think of myself as a space weaver, a host-servant and a social acupuncturist. My artistic and research practice is that of weaving space while meeting strangers and bringing people together while I am sharpening my listening of underrepresented stories. I draw a genealogical line from Dada, Surrealism, Louise Bourgeois, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, William Kentridge, Mona Hatoum, Cornelia Parker and Ann Hamilton. During my studies and formation, in the United Kingdom, Greece, Finland, and the United States, my focus was in installation and performance art as well as collaborative practices. The visual arts are my springboard and tools to reach out to poetry and politics, performance and aesthetics, public and indoor spaces, community based projects and cultural activism. In my own practice, I create performative installations and instigate collaborative projects that combine multiple mediums and reveal the corporeal presence of the artist and the viewer/ witness/ participant and can possibly form a loose community. My intent is to create a bio-logical family, one that accepts differences, embraces ignorance and celebrates a meeting with the stranger, the other, that is to say ourselves. My practice looks for untold narratives, a key reason why the main thread in my work is about herstories. The interweaving themes are about blind dates, meeting strangers, obeying surprise.
Blind Dates. Blind Date is a method I started in 2006 as an interdisciplinary, art research project. t’s basic matrix is that of collaboration, relational aesthetics, and performative participation. The form, duration, location, and participants are ever changing. I have been a/the stranger everywhereI have lived in the world. Sometimes I even feel like a/the stranger in my own country, Greece because I have lived so many years abroad. My art studio has always served as a sacred and transformative space and has naturally become for me a place to share my practice with others. My art studio has evolved into its own installation, a creative gathering, a meeting place, a place to share ideas and collaborate. Throughout my career and with the blind date project in particular, I have collaborated with over 250 creative humans including: Visual artists and writers (Athens 2006), visual artists and philosophers (Athens 2007), performance artists (2010), poets, different generations of visual artists (Rethymno 2018), newcomer and local artists (Blind Platform, Piraeus 2016-2018), visual artists and a village (Lesvos 2011, Tinos 2018), a city (Patras 2014, Heraklion 2015), an island (Ithaca 2013). This is not a prescriptive or normative curating: it is an artist’s practice. I pay attention to the genealogy of artists who have paved this path, orchestrating their exhibitions as radical or sensorial experiences: Gustave Courbet, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein and later on Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Marta Rosler, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rick Lowe and Tania Bruguera (I have the honor of collaborating with the last two artists.) When strangers become friends and create a temporal community then the space between them becomes a form of hospitality. With these relationships comes a critical reclaiming of public space thus fostering a glocal intimacy. I am following the Derridean notion of hospitality, that being radical, unconditional and absolute; intrinsically connected with aesthetics. The only debt is for the stranger to share their name: their identity is ever becoming. Blind date methodology has been infiltrating my collaborations with scientists, doctors, singers, dancers, sociologists and writers (Margaret Atwood and Howard Barker among others) for inter and trans- disciplinaryprojects that have manifested in my work as installations, videos, drawings and performances. I have exhibited these works in museums, foundations and independent spaces in the United Kingdom, Greece, the United States, Georgia, Czech Republic, Canada and Switzerland . The Blind Date as an artistic practice has a legacy already and I have been asked to exhibit at Kaskadenkondensator in Basel (2018) and recently at Parsons/ The New School Gallery - which opened in February 2020 and it was frozen due to Covid-19. Blind Platform, -a totally DIY project- has been also included in the manual of good practices of integration published by the European Union and was chosen from an expert group. Another project that fulfils the “unexpected” participation and opens up a safe space for sharing inner thoughts and self prophecies was the Oracle Drawings, Prophecy Remains I created in collaboration with Karen Finley in DOCUMENTA 14. Karen and myself built the context framework and created a site specific participatory outdoor and video installation that was responsive to the building that is the Museum of Anti-dictatorial and Democratic Resistance. We invited our guests to co-create the form and shape but also be the authors of the content in order to orchestrate an open-ended work.
Herstories. My maternal grandma was the weaver of our family-social fabric for all the years she lived. Orchestrating throughout her life a family of 72 relatives from her four daughters. In my work, I try to listen carefully, understand and strengthen the female narrative. I am very much interested in how the woman-to-woman conversations are weaved. I started with autobiographical drawings, sculptures, photographs, performances that use the white canvas of wedding dresses. The wedding gown is a plane where gendered, class and cultural identities come together and form this tool of the social rite of passage. I choose to display the wedding dresses turned inside-out in order to both emphasize their inner side that touches the female body (and bears its traces from a wedding) and to reveal the toil that was used for its production, and fabric-design-sewing-labor, which is traditionally designated as “women’s work”. The first time I used them was for the visual performance I created at the Linbury Stage in Royal Opera House/ Covent Garden in London as moving tableaux vivants, then in a outdoor installation in the European Cultural Centre of Delphi, and in the Holy Bachelorette in the Wedding Cave, commission of the Athens Festival that travelled in Switzerland in the Archeological Museum of Basel. In this installation I started collecting questions from women and then receiving answers from others as a blind date between women from the USA and Greece, from 18yo up to 70+ from different class, race backgrounds. I have also been working with communities of women in Tinos, Czech Republic and Georgia, creating installations with soft materials, poetry, looms, photographs, video where I try to open up spaces in order to provoke resilience and listen actively to herstories. When I do not work with communities of women I pray/ meditate for them: I weave or create ceramic installations in order to honor them and support female narratives and thus create ruptures and openings to the regulatory, paternalistic his-tory.
Teaching. Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy argues that education should “become the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” Having taught Visual Arts for the last 15 years at Graduate and Undergraduate levels in various institutions in Greece, France and the United States, Blind Date art based research practice has integrated into my teaching methodology. Through different visual art mediums the main procedure is deep research for each student inwardly and outwardly, placing questions of what, for what, so what. Students that matter in the process of informing and enriching the univers-ity. I am coming into the class having the principle of togetherness. I do not presuppose any knowledge or ignorance. Teaching is well learning as we teachers open up to listen to our students. My goal is that my students can fulfil themselves inside and outside of the institutionalized spaces and shape their identities and future. I have served as a professor, a mentor, a curator, and supporter and referee. I feel proud when my former students progress in further education and achieve to fertilize the network connections I have provided them.
ART again. I keep placing questions in order to find myself in the context of the future I want to live in. What does it mean to make art or call oneself an artist in this time of crisis and what kind of privilege is this? We have been through humanitarian and financial crises but with the current pandemic inequalities are even more visible and critical when thousands of humans in the world cannot access basic needs of housing and health care. Current virus pandemic brings forward the interdependency that can establish a radical equality that is needed in the world more than ever and I believe that art can be an ally to this cause.