The game
(2024)
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Happening, 2016. Participant's research, including improvised full recorded interview with first generation Albanian immigrants to Greece, images, and thematic text. The research was conducted for the workshop, "Logics of Worlds", inspired by Alain Badiou's work and organised by architect Filippos Oraiopoulos, at Athens School of Fine Art (ASFA), Master of Visual Arts (Marios Spiliopoulos, Giorgios Xiropaides), December 2016.
Adopting the political approach of Badiou's "L' Organisation Politique", applying direct intervention for societal problems, including immigration and labour, I used play as a method to facilitate improvised discussions. People share and respond more freely when participating in structured, but playful interactions, such as those a game involves. Albanians speak three languages, Albanian, Greek and Italian, so I wasn't able to translate parts of the conversation. Avlona is an English now obsolete name for Vlore, an Albanian seaport and former ancient Greek colony Aulon. Albanians came as refugees in Greece initially in the 1990s, after the fall of communism in their home country.
Notably, the workshop was slightly interrupted by a performance art student, who brought a live hen to slaughter in the studio. This can be taken as a metaphor for scapegoating (and re-assigning the gender of male) refugees.
For this exposition, I include an essay by Pantelis Boukalas, in Kyriakos Katzourakis, O "Dromos Pros Ti Dysi" (The Way to the West), 2001, as well as Kyriakos Katzourakis' introduction in English.
The exposition also aims to juxtapose the experimental and the conceptual in the fine arts; and to make the 'invisible' visible.
I don't have any personal or other connections with Albania (or North Macedonia); I have never visited. This was a project to research and document in an artistic manner the refugee and immigration crisis in my native Greece, but also to voice my opinions on this topic from the perspective of the native.
Albania (and North Macedonia) is a non-EU country; Greece, my native (and my parents' and grandparents' native), has been in the EU since 1981. I have also been a UK national, by naturalisation, since 2011.
Paradoxically, the outcome of this project was that fictitious non-EU son(s)/daughter(s) of mine have been (since 2018) on UK police databases, as disabled 14, 19, 21 year-old transgender Italian/Albanians. Maybe I was married to a Nordic neo-Nazi, who was living with one of them since 2013 in London? Dismissed. Or did I have the one that came to the UK in 2017, who is the daughter of a known (not to myself) former Greek politician? Dismissed by the Greek authorities. My urgent concerns about serious international organised criminal activity (not even honouring children's basic rights) were reported and confirmed by the Greek and Scandinavian authorities.
The Greek Golden Dawn - with their "Big Idea" (Megali Idea) of conquering foreign countries, like North Macedonia, and their chronic attacks on immigrants and refugees in Greece - was convicted as a criminal organisation in October 2020. They invented the 'concept' of the 'Real Greek', dependent on any Greek's political orientation. Now they're losing their sixty seven (67) appeals.
For Pavlos Fyssas, aka Killah P.
For Alain Badiou and the OP.
The work is in progress.
Silence surrounds us, silence around us – on creativity in communication
(2024)
Erika Matsunami
Silence surrounds us, silence around us – on creativity in communication, which interacts with and addresses the theoretical and practical exploring of the artistic research for Green x (2022 –). Simultaneously, it might be possible to create an artistic method of intervention artistically, which aims at the theoretical level evolutionally.
Is language the tool? If it is yes, what kind of tool is the language? Through the language, what can we produce and provide? Thereby, I address the topic of creativity in communication in reading silently, speech, and listening. On creativity in communication is a play to draw models. Thereby the leitmotif is "reading".
Critical seeing in a model on reading subjectivity and objectivity at the online artistic representational level, Question for on creativity
The research objective(s) is a future idea for physical space and its mobility within virtual space (potentiality) for a new type of idea for notation between tradition and modernity.
In this aspect, towards international communication gaps between tradition and modernity, DADA solved the issue of communication and explored a new way of communication, that was not a philosophical metaphor, but rather that consisted of semiotics and semantics in the context of design, was creative. – New visual and auditory codes. Thereby I deal with “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”, that is a logic of nonsense by Wittgenstein in the theme of space, body and time.
"Silence surrounds us, silence around us" is an artistic research series, after "N.N-Zwischenliegend", I have been started to explore in 2020, after the corona-pandemic.