All that glitters and NO black holes
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Design, 1995-96, 2023. Design, 1996-97. Photography, 2010, 2011. Essay, 2015. Collage Text, 2022.
The exposition serves as commentary and guide on the place of art, in a gradually environmentally and technologically challenged world. I further make a commentary on outgrown conceptions of the foreign, in terms of the so-called "exotic', and the non-foreign,within the context of contemporary globalisation. This, to raise open questions on the impact of the aforementioned on global politics.
The re-design proposal, inspired by De Stijl, illustrates the modernist historical view that art appears to be regressive, rather than progressive: as soon as a movement or a school becomes established, reaching its culmination, it starts declining.
Finally, I have included a graduate school architectural design project in the archaeological site of Eleusis accompanied by new commentary.
With essay about experimental film making in the British avant-garde, published in "Architecture and Culture" journal, 2015, which is about the environmental challenges of the urban environment. The reference to the TV show "Alone", a competitive prize show of sole or two-person players, is a reminder that humans can live in the natural environment developing survival tactics already applied by their ancestors.
About how to navigate this exposition:
Scroll from top to bottom, then from bottom to top, then scroll to the top right, then scroll to the bottom right.
For Luke, who I haven't met; with respect and care.
मृगतृष्णा, Mirage: Reengaging socio-spatial peripheries through site-specific film
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Lasse Mouritzen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In this essay I will discuss how social engaged and site-specific filmmaking has a potential to reengage socio-spatial peripheries.
Based on my recent residency at Flame University, February 2019 in Pune, I will describe how socio-spatial distinctions and peripheries are formed during processes of urbanisation. Following Ananya Roy and her description on the antagonism of utopia (Roy, 2011) I will look at the ambiguity between the blue print and the process of the build environment, and describe how the build environment and its function responds to its own process; the construction workers, the labor camps surrounding it. I will explain how my research evolved into a site-specific social-artistic film installation. Furthermore I will describe the potentials and advantages of using art-based research while working with social minorities through methods of non-conventional dialogues, soft interventions and visual communication.
I will argue how the social-artistic film, both during the process of the research, filmmaking and screening, can be seen to open up new reflections of socio-spatial peripheries. My argument is that site-specific social-engage art and research should not try to exchange understandings, facts or categories between different socio-spatial peripheries, like for example news, media or documentaries would do. Rather, site-specific social-engage art and research should form awareness of the complexities and questions relating to social inequality and complexity, not by exposing or translating knowledge from socio-spatial peripheries but by blurring or disguising it, as a mirage; encouraging interest and questions instead of answers. In this regard, I would argue in elaboration of Gayatri Spivak’s essential essay ‘Can the subaltern speak’ (Spivak 1988), that giving voices to the subaltern or the socio-political excluded has an inherent danger of remarking socio-spatial peripheries. My argument is therefore, instead of forming facts on socio-spatial peripheries or facilitating voices of the other, site-specific social engaged art can form questions, imaginations and curiosity even auto-fictions to open the peripheries instead of closing or confirming them.