Novel
(2023)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Single channel digital video, with photography and text, 5' 41'', 2007
'Novel' is a half-photography, half-fiction digital video, which was inspired by my temporary dwelling in different cities during the period of a year. For my contribution to this catalogue, I briefly discuss the artistic process and thinking behind the project. In parallel, I reflect upon the possible theoretical links between visuality, narratives, architecture, and urbanism. I suggest that personal associations are definitive and significant in the ways we tend to occupy and subjectively interpret contemporary urban spaces.
After a lengthy process of collecting photographs and digital film footage, as well as selecting written material, some of it in the form of quotes, from my journal, I completed the video in 2007. My method was:
- I made preparatory sketches that I included in the video (film still 1).
- I used a montage technique I saw in one of Peter Greenaway's films: the separate 'window' on the top or bottom sides of the video (film stills 2, 4, 5) that denotes parallel action.
- I overlaid photographs (film still 3), a technique that allowed me to create the animating effect of the moving image, without using film footage.
In painting, the artist can make layers out of collaged material that might be unconnected or purposefully juxtaposed to the painting's subject. Using the above method, I asked the viewer to watch the video more like a moving series of paintings, rather than as a film.
The video, like my other video art work, was exhibited and archived under my artist's pseudonym, Betty Nigianni.
Written in 2012, the essay is a separate piece to accompany this exposition.
Note: Please disregard comment I posted about a notification that doesn't appear anymore.
Of Haunted Spaces
(2022)
author(s): Ella Raidel
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Of Haunted Spaces is an art-based research project focusing on Chinese ghost cities. This exposition follows the making of an essay film that combines acting and documenting to indicate the phantasmatic aspect of global capitalism. In China, the need to maintain and boost economic growth through surplus production results in more cities being built than are needed. This exposition investigates how global capitalism is affecting and haunting living conditions today. Urban spaces, which were once a grandiose vision for boosting prosperity through collective fantasy, have now become exhausted and empty sites. Ella Raidel develops a performative documentary film to create a discursive space in which facts, analyses, commentaries, and references are woven into one narrative.
Melliferopolis – collaborating with uncontrollable, flying, stinging insects
(2020)
author(s): Christina Stadlbauer
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition explores encounters between humans and insects, in the framework of a long term project around honeybees in urban contexts called Melliferopolis. The interventions proposed by Melliferopolis create shared spaces of encounters for Bees and Humans. The choice to work with these insects in an urban and participatory setting creates situations that are surprising, unpredictable or challenge concepts of "safety". The exposition aims to develop an understanding for risks that arise when collaborating with non human animals, explores reactions to situations that are not entirely controllable and elaborates on notions of safety, hazard and unpredictability within practice based artistic research. As the territory to investigate these questions we look at interventions, performances and installations produced in public spaces in the city of Helsinki in the framework of Melliferopolis since 2012.
Body Weathering - poetic nebular intentions
(2019)
author(s): Anna Maria Orru
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Weather is not an object experienced from a distance, but rather a medium in which every living being is immersed. This weather reporting views clouds as 'containers of possibility,' as an infrastructure for thinking about the body as a vibrant, experiential and living matter to reinforce a direct relation to nature - merging land and sky. Because environmental commitments are complex, I enter the challenge through exploring embodied modes of inquiry into urban-making using a corporeal relation to clouds and atmosphere, exploring their common materiality through a day's workshop culminating into a performance (modes expressed as intermissions). The artistic research is grounded in a Butoh choreography practice called Body Weather, performing fabulations with clouds supported by theoretical roots in corporeal studies, vibrant materialities, environmental imagining, atmospheres and assembled relations. I engage with the question of how to curate a corporeal poetics in urban-making with clouds in mind, and what if bodily movements created atmospheres to ecologically live by? My intent is to cultivate an artistic embodied approach to urban-making, thinking through clouds and embracing the body as a refined medium for generating a poethic -poetic, political and ethical - entangle with space.
Hinges of correlation: Spatial devices of social coexistence
(2015)
author(s): Espen Lunde Nielsen
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This project investigates the coexistence of and the correlation between the inhabitants within my apartment building, using artistic practices and my own lived experience. These everyday spaces form the primary interface between the individual and the larger social entity of the city. Consciously, or partly unknowingly, one interacts with others through spatial demarcations, using embedded spatial devices (such as squeaking floorboards, peepholes, mailboxes, etc.) that project life and the presence of other people through sound, light, or matter. Most of these devices are partly unintended, often serve other practical functions, and go unnoticed – but nevertheless hold a latent spatial potential for a recalibration of the social dimension of the city and an architecture to come. This exposition features a combination of photography, 3D laser scans, and creative writing, followed by a written account of the practice.
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.
P.A.F (pavement.as.fails)
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Maëlla Castiglione
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
P.A.F. is a project designed to give visibility to road defects that can become obstacles in urban traffic. Taking care of our cities is a real challenge. In Europe, tourist and historic districts are subject to rehabilitation, leaving other areas neglected. Awareness starts with the importance we attach to things. Making things visible is a way of raising awareness. Our cities need to be inclusive, and we need to take care of them in order to take care of our bodies and our uses. The city studied here is Porto (Portugal), but the project is adaptable to a European scale.
Of Haunted Spaces is an art-based research project focusing on Chinese ghost cities. This exposition follows the making of an essay film that combines acting and documenting to indicate the phantasmatic aspect of global capitalism. In China, the need to maintain and boost economic growth through surplus production results in more cities being built than are needed. This exposition investigates how global capitalism is affecting and haunting living conditions today. Urban spaces, which were once a grandiose vision for boosting prosperity through collective fantasy, have now become exhausted and empty sites. Ella Raidel develops a performative documentary film to create a discursive space in which facts, analyses, commentaries, and references are woven into one narrative.open exposition comments (0)
A philosophical essay.open exposition comments (0)
P.A.F. is a project designed to give visibility to road defects that can become obstacles in urban traffic. Taking care of our cities is a real challenge. In Europe, tourist and historic districts are subject to rehabilitation, leaving other areas neglected. Awareness starts with the importance we attach to things. Making things visible is a way of raising awareness. Our cities need to be inclusive, and we need to take care of them in order to take care of our bodies and our uses. The city studied here is Porto (Portugal), but the project is adaptable to a European scale.open exposition comments (0)