The Loot
(2024)
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Islington studio flat 4, at 14 Barnsbury Road, London, 2022, privately rented. Interior design as an art installation. Looted, 2024.
My personal belongings were still at the property for two months, after I left on 27 March 2024 and was asked to collect them by 3 or 4 April from Woolwich. After I left, the landlords moved in two or three under aged, who I have never met, for them to pretend to be my daughters. After that, they must have been removing them one by one over the last few months and until October 2024.
14 Barnsbury Road was deemed illegal through the courts, on 22 April, shortly after I was forced to leave in March. The maintenance employed many Polish citizens, all dressed in black with black caps, like all XRW supporters dress.
Twenty-one (20+1) digital photographs for twenty (20) missing Albanian and of Albanian ethnicity non-EU immigrants and one (1) missing Italian citizen.
The twenty-one persons whose details got stolen were abducted by mainly Golden Dawn and, secondarily, the NRM; they are deceased. Golden Dawn were originally pagans, drawing from the ancient Greek mythology and ritualistic practices, also of human sacrifice.
My personal details were also stolen. Was I going to be the twenty-second?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_(magazine)
Investigatory research with artworks. The art world has been traditionally male dominated. This has changed a bit in contemporary art, but not dramatically. Female artists have sometimes adopted male attitudes or personas to break into the art scene; see Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin from the YBA movement. I hold the view that art is not gendered, for instance that there is no art for women or so-called women's art. Good art transcends such categories, tapping into more universal experiences. Saying this, I would like to quote Nancy Spero, who doesn't crudely distinguish between male and female art, as follows: "What if the default gender for 'artist' were female? What if, when we looked at a work by a woman, we said to ourselves, "That is art," and when we looked at a work by a man, we automatically identified it in our minds as 'men's art'?"
In 1999, I wrote a long essay on the architectural uncanny that I submitted as my graduation thesis for my first MA in architectural theory. I called it "Space as a 'Bad' Object: A criminal investigation on the notion of space"; I got inspiration from detective novels and real-life crime stories. The long essay was about the role of architectural space in crime. It was completely unsupervised: I received a distinction by a Bartlett staff member. I took the digital photographs in conceptual adherence with that essay.
I was a postgraduate philosophy student 9/2017-11/2019 at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
In this exposition, I include two new photographs from a series of digital photography called "Forensics", taken with my mobile phone, after I was forced to leave the property I was renting on 27 March 2024. I gave the photography series that name, because it has served the purpose of investigating, recording and tracking a crime, for which architectural space has been used.
For Chris, who was suddenly transferred by his employer, from London, where his daughter lives, to somewhere outside of London; and for Lawrence, whose temporary post was prematurely terminated, though he was planning to return to his legal studies. To all those who don't just "play" the cultural and racial diversity clause.
See exposition in connection with "The Origins of The Game", "Debris", and "XRW (Implicature)".
Q&A
(2024)
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
I include questions I was given at the Janine Antoni workshop, Toynbee Studios, in 2010, as feedback to my work. Much of Janine Antoni's art is about the female body and cultural identity. I address the participants by the first names they used to introduce themselves at the workshop. The questions were given in writing to each participant by the rest of the group, to offer material for thinking further their artistic practice in their own time.
I include the answers I would give now, if I was asked the same questions.
Artists, architects and designers give interviews about their work. Amongst them, architects tend to write more and publish more written work in relation to their practice.
Aftermath - Or E for Installation
(2024)
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Design for interactive art installation with urban regeneration proposal, as well as video about environmentalism and our technologically mediated private and public lives; installation catalogue design with photography and textual collage, 2021-2023.
"There is a massive abundance of goods that end up in landfills. With such abundance of goods, no one should be deprived."
Visitors will have to leave an unwanted item of theirs and take another to collect the installation catalogue. The installation will be monitored for this purpose. Designed with Wi-Fi light technology for agility training, the interactive floor in the entrance will be controlled by the visitors through a tablet computer that will allow them to select the difficulty level.
The exposition offers a critical viewpoint to the contemporary gallery-mediated commercial environment by making reference to the non-monetary economies of artistic and cultural production.
Art "is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy". The enemy is whoever exploits their fellows out of egoism or personal interest (Pablo Picasso).
With summary and questions about David Murakami Wood's article "The Global Turn to Authoritarianism", 'Surveillance and Society', (15), 3/4, 2017: 357-370.