Research Catalogue

Abstract This thesis analyzes an original technique based on the transformation of ash into a self-supporting sheet suitable for charcoal drawing. The process, based on the use of sifted ash and powdered wallpaper paste as a binder, generates a lightweight, porous mineral support with a unique tactile quality, similar to a “combustion skin.” The research examines the technical, aesthetic, and conceptual dimensions of the material obtained, placing it in the context of contemporary art and practices that aim to stabilize ephemeral residues. The ash sheet is interpreted as artificial geology, a sediment constructed by the artist, and as a poetic device that intertwines memory, combustion, and rebirth.

This research stems from the need to give theoretical, methodological, and poetic form to a practice that has developed over time through intuitive experimentation, phenomenological observations, and a direct relationship with the material. The aim of this thesis is to define, analyze, and formalize a new painting technique based on a reactive mixture and a vortex modeling gesture, a technique that is not limited to using heterogeneous materials, but generates real visual phenomena: currents, stratifications, turbulence, figurative emergences. This technique arises from the encounter between everyday materials—malleable glue, transparent glue, toothpaste, Amuchina hand sanitizer, and pigments—and a specific gesture: the rotation of a cut brush that does not spread the color but sets it in motion, forcing it to react, organize itself, and take shape. This gesture is complemented by a final incision, made with a small object, which does not draw but frees the figure from the material, as if it emerged spontaneously from a dynamic field. The resulting painting is not representation but event. It does not describe a subject: it lets it happen.

The exposition includes reworked video excerpt from the 'Glass Cities' two hour-long video art installation, with film footage and photography from three different cities, London, Athens and Venice. The original work was created for Elica's live music performance, shown at the Small Music Theatre, Athens, Greece, in 2007. The aim of the process of making the video art was to remain and explore the surface of things when addressing historical changes. I used banal and seemingly unconnected photographic and digital film footage for this purpose and effect. The 'lure' is the film still: neither photograph, nor film, a notion that has been inadequately theorised in visual art history and theory. Following a historical materialist approach, I employ the artistic theme of dead cities. Venice is a dead city in the visual arts modernist tradition. A dead city is a city that fails to change. Venice is actually slowly sinking, because it can't manage the rising water levels. In this context, I briefly trace Venice's economic history of the flourishing academic arts in the Baroque period, its Murano glass industry evocative of the ancient arts and crafts, and its inevitable re-invigoration by virtue of the Venice Biennale, the well-known international art and architectural exhibition. I named the original video art after John Smith's experimental documentary about London 'Slow Glass' (1988-91). In the film, one of the narrators describes the liquid composition of glass - "even when it's hard, it's still a liquid" - which is a metaphor for the process of change. Since I made the video installation, but also this exposition, I found out that my ancestor, a great grandfather, who was originally from Italy, might have been an Italian Jew and that this might have been the reason he left Italy in the nineteenth century to travel to and settle in my native Greece. Because the exposition is about collective history and collective consciousness, the research video could be taken as a reminder of the factual, global rise of antisemitism in the twenty-first century; in Italy represented by the extreme right-wing, neofascist political group Forza Nuova. The country that has seen the most prominent rise in antisemitic ideology is the United States of America.

Topographies of the Obsolete is an artistic research project conceived in 2012 by
 University of Bergen Professors Neil Brownsword and Anne Helen Mydland,
in collaboration with six European HEI’s and the British Ceramics Biennial.
Emerging through two phases (2012-15; 2015-2020) it has to date engaged
ninety-seven interdisciplinary artists, scholars, cultural commentators and
students from thirteen countries. It has transformed participants’ practices, with
works originating out of the initial research being celebrated on an international
platform. Topographies of the Obsolete has received funding from a variety of
institutions, alongside its core support from the Norwegian Artistic Research
Programme (2013-15 & 2015-17), whose peer review system (2015) rated it
as ‘exemplary… strengthening artistic research and its scope beyond potential
communities of practitioners/researchers’. The project explores the landscape and associated histories of post-industry, with an initial emphasis on Stoke-on-Trent, a world-renowned ceramics capital that bears evidence of fluctuations in global fortunes.

Olskroksmotet Blues är den avslutande delen i mitt autoetnografiska projekt som pågick i olika former mellan 2014-2021, och där jag bland annat publicerat två artiklar (Kroon 2015 och 2016). RC expositionen består av tre delarbeten - arkivblad, arkivmönster och göteborg grid – jämte bakgrund och teori & metod. Utifrån min historia som fosterbarn söker jag fånga såväl mina egna erfarenheter och uttryck, som att sätta dessa i ljuset av större samhälleliga skeenden. Olskroksmotet Blues var också del av Mikrohistoriers fysiska grupputställning på Konstfack, Stockholm i september 2021.

This article explores monotheistic religions as powerful linguistic and social structures that function through a mechanism of collective delusion. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s structuralist insights, the text argues that these faiths are not based on objective history but are fictions codified long after the events they describe.