Hello Angelina and welcome to NotRandomArt. The current issue is revolving around the problem of identity. Is there any particular way you would describe your identity as an artist but also as a human being in dynamically changing, unstable times? In particular, does your cultural substratum/identity form your aesthetics?
Hi! I am very happy being here. Thank you Change brings uncertainty and uncertainty brings change. Uncertainty and change can provoke active engagement, enthusiasm and highly creative responses. It relates to the feeling of who we are and what we do and what we need. It’s a journey. The challenge of our time is to find a journey worthy of your heart and your soul. ..Sure, I have less money now, but I am making my art, and this feels like real life. The operative word is "change." In my case it has to come from within. Actually what marks my work is the power to shape the material of pain we all have.
Would you like to tell us something about your background? Could you talk a little about experiences that have influenced the way you currently relate yourself to your artworks?
I am a graduate (BA with Distinction) in Fine Arts and Technology and I also have a Masters degree in Digital Arts(university of the Arts London). I am teaching at Athens cultural center Art and New Media . For 12 weeks was the Course leader in Digital Arts at iversity (platform for open massive online courses) More over, I am working my own videos, as well as sculptures made from polyester. I am also the Co founder and video artist of ‘state of flux’ dance group.
Some of my art work over the past years has been focused on ‘minimal movement’. My view regarding the power of that which is minimal has been reinforced by research, the application of ideas and the results from previous research. The movement of a unit is considered to be that which drives all things. I don’t wish to lead anyone to wonder about the physical world and its laws or create religious questions regarding God and creation. The project is centered on Man and his inner world. That which I call minimal movement, is the internal movement, internal action or intensity and how everything doesn’t necessarily have to entail external action. Even total lack of movement indicates internal intensities, conflicts, disputes and concerns.
I prefer to express myself metaphorically. metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, a certain formula, while metaphor is an image.. An image — as opposed to a symbol .
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about race and ethnic identity in visual culture?
I was truly inspired by the work of George Mellies .Méliès’ principle contribution to cinema was the combination of traditional theatrical elements to motion pictures - he sought to present spectacles of a kind not possible in live theatre. He created the basic vocabulary of special effects.
Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage has influenced my work as well, Like Deren, Brakhage came to understand film through poetry, and his earliest films do resemble those of Deren and her contemporaries. These kind of films that actually stress psychological themes–the conflict between wish-dream and reality… Last but not least Andrei Tarkovsky. His films often described as poetic works of "pure cinema." Free of symbolism and full of emotion and atmosphere, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky are enigmatic…
And as Anthony Burgess (A clockwork orange) has said “It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”
While studying your artworks I couldn’t help but think about Virginia Woolf and her novels. In "To the Lighthouse " she wrote:
“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
When one is looking at, experiencing your works, one is being confronted with the mosaic nature of life: fragments, pieces, body parts, separated, examined, zoomed in, co-existing in a symbiosis with unrestrained nature, life that paves the way through weakness and emptiness. Could you share your thoughts on such interpretation of your works?
Thank you!
Woolf’s way of writing about people and their feelings is so overwhelming, and her prose so highly wrought, that the novel's setting somehow escaped me.
What is life? "Every minute of every day we choose. Who we are, who we forgive, who we defend and protect. To choose a side, a path… define the path of a life. osmos born of matter and gas, And the reason? Are we born only to die?? If there is a beginning, must there be an end. Is this fire of life living inside us is meant to go on? Who tends the flames? We call it the miracle of life, conception. An act without which mankind would not exist,…
In the end, all we have left are memories. Bits and pieces of the time we've spent … a simple recollection of actions… When we remember something from the past we think of it in parts as if putting together a puzzle, which is really ready and exists in our minds…
In my work, I transform an object into something else. When I edit and develop my videos in premiere most of the times I see what at first place could not see. Our perception is something like our dreams. They ‘enter’ in many colours and shapes. Just like void does. A void can be filled with many elements, such as colors, shapes, motion, tension, symbols and sounds. Void is flickering and vibrating unceasingly, because is affected and appertained by matter. I use emptiness, as it is an outcome of the subtraction of all these things that can be deleted from a space.
Through my research I realized that there are many matters arising, regarding the research of an empty space. I have understood, trough my study on empty space, that a void can be considered as an existing matter, much more different in its thickness from the full one.
For instance a bottle or a glass becomes useful from its ‘inside’ empty space.
It is like the ‘useful’ part coming from the missing one. Void and full are two elements, which are combined with a different kind of thickness and the one ‘moves’ inside the other. It is something like the invisible matter (but at the same time an existing One) that exists around the stars.
Moreover, my research led me to another question. The question is not how we observe something but the way we really see it. Understanding it through a concept. In order to create an image I keep the way I see an object in its physical world and try to transform it into a conceptual idea.
A different world appears in front of me, beyond the visual or even the natural. I am looking for elements, which later I use in a different way than their origin. (For example, I transform an object that I film into something else. A jellyfish into a ‘visual’ painting- an analogue format into a digital one-in order to express my thoughts regarding the meaning of empty space)
Everything that our eyes see is a condensation of the substance that exists in universe.
We perceive all things through our senses, trying to understand the world around us.
‘Things’ don’t end where our eyes see, but on the contrary they moving toward to infinity and mixed together into something, which, metaphorically, seems to be like a giant, “Without limit mush”.
Every form of art is a self –sufficient world, which functions by the use of its means. It could be addressed to different senses or other times it provokes a diversity of emotions or thoughts. Art heightens the sense of existence. It tries to give life into a meaning beyond the obvious or common.
Norway, in the mid 90's and with my research in Video Art and the History of Video Art. During that period, I experimented with the cameras available at the time, such as Hi8, Super-8, and DV. I learned how to edit using Avid and produced numerous small experimental art films. Conceptually, I was inspired by video artists such as Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and Bruce Naumann amongst many others. I used effects and experimental sound in my films. It was a very exciting time for my development, and I explored all kinds of filmic work, from 80's video art to more experimental directors of the time, such as Peter Greenaway, Jim Jarmusch, and Hal Hartley as well as the greats such as Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard. So my work was shaped by this strange hybrid of influences: everything from animated MTV shorts to deeply conceptual post modernistic cinema.
Later on, I started to build video installations, combined with photography, objects and performance. From this, I started to become involved with stage art and independent dance and theatre. Several directors have given me the time and space to experiment using multiple video projectors, and my work has become an active element onstage, sometimes interacting with the performers. Every project has been useful in some way for exploring and refining my ideas. Now in my capacity as film director, I'm able to call upon my experiences gained from working as a cross disciplinary artist.
Your artworks are revolving around the problem of social identity and cultural affiliations. Is there any particular way you would describe your identity as an artist but also as a human being in dynamically changing, unstable times? In particular, does your cultural substratum/identity form your aesthetics?
I belong to a minority group in society and that identity is always a part of me and my work. I don’t believe my artworks are changing due to unstable times but that I'm working my way through a theme and a method over time. The content of my work is becoming more and more personal and I think that is because I dare to be more honest with myself. What I find interesting to work with is in my immediate presence. When I collaborate with stageartists, we often focus on a current political theme. In these collaborations I work more as an art activist and have a broader openess for the aesthetics. My work is then more experimental with research on different ways to develop live presentations in the space.
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about race
and ethnic identity in visual culture?
“Revolted by the Thought of Known Places… Sweeney Astray” by Joan Jonas was one of the first performance installations that really made a huge impact on me. I was living in Paris during this time, in the early 90s, with a lot of influences from different cultures. It became the starting point of my own work. Joan Jonas practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures. Jonas continues to find new layers of meanings in themes and questions of gender and identity that have fueled her art for over thirty years. She is a great inspiration still today.
It is impossible to avoid the topic of body consciousness, embodied emotions and the image of body and personal identity that we see in your practice. What is the function of the identity appearing in your artworks – is it a canvas used to present your ideas or rather the subject of the art? What inspired you to use this as a theme in your practice?
I have been developing my visual imagery since I began studying art and film - from conceptual thinking, composition, using light and colour in different ways, through all the different techniques I've utilised over the years in my work and in my collaborations with stage artists such as dancers, musicians and actors. My approach is always developing through exploring these things. Visual imagery in essence is your way of experiencing what you see and transforming it. This is my world that I want to share and express through my art. The body consciousness, embodied emotions and the image of body and personal identity is part of this visual imagery, the emotional essence in my practice. Always present and always developing in different themes and projects.
Marina Abramovic stated: You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of
which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'Can you relate anyhow to these words?
de-identify myself, by losing my roots, my culture, I would be very happy. Unfortunately the human being does'nt choose the place where he is born. He grows up in a society that automatically identifies, through education, culture, family... More than ever I think it's more important to go on a way of self-knowledge with the aim to meet “the other”.. This other without which we can not exist. It's the same for the artist. It is more important for me to be focused on my practice than to try to define it according to esthetic criteria of identification. It's probably the reason i like to remember the painter Matisse who said or wrote that an artist must never be prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation.
Would you like to tell us something about your background? Could you talk a little about experiences that has influence the way you currently relate yourself to your artworks?
All my way is influenced by encounterings.
It began by the meeting with my professor of literature at school. More than giving French or Literature classes, she brought us to discover texts, movies, plays, visual artworks and to think about on what we saw or read.. Thanks to her that I met Pierre Vincke, a theatredirector who was worjink in the tradition of Grotowski ... Both of them have led me to go to theater school. In this school I had meetings. Meetings with artists but also and especially human beings that made me discover. I always need o discover rather than to master a practice. It's probably the reason my encounter with Monica Klingler and Boris Nieslony was decisive for me and led me on the path of Performance Art which is a form still difficult to define. Each performance artist has a different definition of what it is...
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about race and ethnic identity in visual culture?
No I don't have a specific artwork that has influenced my artistic practise but many.
I'm influenced by some philsophers as well as poets or musicians or dancers or visual artists but also by some places or landscapes or atmospheres ... For some years, I was used for example to go to India where I was used to follow some traditionnal muscians or to learn bharatanatyam and practice vipassana meditation... Of course this experience has impacted my art work.... This brought me to think and work differently... My experience in India brought me to discover traditionnal strong art and paradoxally to the way of Performance Art. But there I see one common point: to make no separation between art and life and to be here and now, without projection on the future.
It's difficult for me to speak about race and ethnic identity. But I can say that today we miss more and more this notion of “to be here and now” which is more present in some cultures ... By practising Performance Art, it's my way to be connected to this way of thinking. And even in this field actually it's more and more difficult. The society and the art world brings us more and more to plan in advance, to define our work, more than to do. Just to do. To do what we deeply need.
And of course, my encountering with Black Market International and later the notion of Open Source or Open session via PAErsche have also a big impact on my work. When we go on that, each of us perform by sharing time and space but without trying to convince each other on some common way. This is for me a wonderfull way how we can meet each other, regardless of our origin, our race or our “identity”...
Many of your works carry an autobiographical message. Since you transform your experiences into your artwork, we are curious, what is the role of memory in your artistic productions? We are particularly interested if you try to achieve a faithful translation of your previous experiences or if you rather use memory as starting point to create.
My memory is clearly a starting point to create. I don't have any autobiographical message. I use my personnal experience ( what I feel , what I see, what I learn, what I ear...) to work. It's a motor or a material. I'm not able to paint, so I can't do something with red or white or yellow or black colors. All I have is life, a body alive. And I need to do something with that...
My sensation about life sometimes is too intense then I need to transform this intensity in some action. Some artistic action... If people can take something from this action this is great... but I don't want to give them “a specific message” or to control the translation of my experience.