Research Catalogue

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", organised by architect Filippos Oraiopoulos, at Athens School of Fine Art (ASFA), Master of Visual Arts (Marios Spiliopoulos, Giorgios Xiropaides), December 2016. 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. 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 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. 2023: The outcome of this project is that "I" have been on UK police databases as a 16 year-old Albanian transvestite.

What triggered me to start this research is the multiplicity of reality. How something is represented, how it actually is and then how we all perceive it in our very own way. In that sense reality doesn’t exist, only versions of it. The lack of awareness of this multiplicity affects a lot our lives; what we believe, what we take as granted and how he behave.Through this practice based research I am experimenting on how to create moments of surprise and realization for the spectator. I work with copies and representations, replicas as I like to call them. The Replicas can be made of different materials, can be virtual or very physical. Until now I used scale models, mirrors and projections but the list is endless; so are the different ways to use the replicas or the impact that they will have. The way that the replicas are introduced to the spectator and their interaction is also very crucial in my work and another field to research. The movement and the body play a significant role to this. The special relationship that we have with our body, the way that we perceive it and how the movement can reset these relations and affect how we experience things.

How can a physical dramaturgy generate transdisciplinary choreography and at the same time how is it influenced by new media? first studio

The weft is an article that requests to hold time and attention about time-based art practices, especially the ones that rely on time as a medium with the usage of technology and multimedia formats to be presented live in the case of performance art, for example. The article is more than a dialogue of a theory, it is a speculation about the future of these practices in terms of cultural impact and sustainability. The questions and speculations posed a question about the status of these practices within the facilitation in educators and practitioners related to Time.

The exposition focuses on the question of ‘distanciation’ that at-once both distances and furthers one’s understanding of the self through being drawn into a work of text – here taken in a broader sense to include also the visual-material – and geographical and temporal distance. The latter interpretation of distance relates to the artistic research project that contextualises the article, which is in response to a call for drawings on the question of genetics and identity, hosted by i3S (Institute of Investigation and Innovation in Health, Porto University). As part of this author’s response, and as an example that may, through its reading, cause some expansion of one’s notion of self, the novel ‘The Inheritors’ by William Golding is discussed. From the point of view of genetic ancestry, Golding’s novel involves incongruous recognition between a family of Neanderthals and a larger group of Homo sapiens, and a more psychological use of the term ‘other’ for foreignness and one’s negotiation of such initial reaction by oneself. The conjoined question of distanciation and other is considered through reference to a large drawing of the author in progress as part of the ancestry project at the time of writing, and through theoretical reference to the work of Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan and Bracha Ettinger that helps elaborate on distanciation, the psychically interpreted other, and a maternal matrixial idea of pre- and post-natal I and non-I of the self in contiguous relationship not only with psychoanalytical theory, but also with global ancestral mitochondrial DNA.

An interactive, mixed-media artistic research process – using somatic experience, dance, listening, storytelling, and visual arts to ponder on the topic of distance in research practice. The focal point of this research process has been the somatic feeling of distance and entanglement and exploring those through movement - captured on film, inspired by and enriched with music by Ólafur Arnalds. The written story is a secondary translation of the research process, formed by the somatic exploration, movement experimentation, painting, and the process of film-making. I’ve used watercolors as an aid to help me translate and express the inquiry in the form of text.