My practice is an enchanting exploration of magic as a remedy and weapon against patriarchal structures. Spells and rituals are treated as poison against structures for individuals whose lives are suchly affected by them. Traversing a series of media – drawing, ceramics, video, writing, and performance – I embed incantations into my creations, inspired by folk tradition and other magical practices.
Sunday The Day of The Sun, post love party - Candles and screen projections, Recyclart, Brussels, 2021. A performance delivered on the main stage of Recyclart in Brussels in the form of a ritual, in order to release an atmosphere of seduction for the party that followed. Surrounded by candles, red lights and projections of my drawings, I read out loud an essayistic autobiographical essay about online dating during quarantine. My intention was to guide the audience through a scripted choreography of the moon phase and introduce them to the world of magic and symbols.
I’ll tell you later cause I don’t want to jinx it. Silk screen prints on a six meter long velvet fabric, 2021. - I'lll tell you later cause I don't want to jinx it consists of a very long black velvet fabric with printed images that hex any patriarchal figure who looks at them. Illustrations about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism create an invisible portal to another world, while written parts on the fabric represent the language that is being spoken in this world. The ending of the piece itself doesn't exist as it doesn't address any space or place, but brings together concerns with gender, validation patterns and patriarchal societies, in particular offering a portable critique of education systems.
Soul Death in a Digital App. paint on the wall and ceramics, dimensions variable, 2021 - An installation exploring different kinds of elliptical architectural suggestions and mystical procedures of alternation as they relate to oppressive institutional structures. Red gestural brushstrokes almost like injuries, and fragmented ceramic pieces overlap in order to form a portable temple, which is activated through a performative reading of a script. The whole piece aims to explore how in archaeological attempts to reconstruct what has been lost , there is a neglect to see how important the dismissal of myth and its unifying explanations may be. At the same time it highlights the importance of the world of chances and signs, and magical practices as coping mechanisms.
The Temple of No Solutions, installation 2021. - 'I hate power, except the power I have to show you something'. Mayer B., 2011. Studying Hunger Journals. Station Hill Press The Temple of no Solutions constitutes a refusal to comply with the demand "to successfully embody the past", and instead is pointing to ways of using traditional texts as "templates", yet "mishandle narratives", displacing them from the pantheon of national cult into the spheres of "folk tradition”. By emphasizing the "flat" and "stiff" character folk imagery may have, the intimacy of being "among and with" images experienced when I paint them on ceramic plates. A wild field of female characters is moving within the temple, getting blocked, but moving nevertheless, speaking, and using magic tools/painted tiles to signal where they stand, and how they relate. things out, to 'let them go'.
No kisses, but bites. Live Performance, 00:08:45, 202. - A performance carried live on Twitch during 2021 Valentine's Day as an improvised narration within the scenery I produced to bring together various elements of my practice, aiming to explore how individuals are damaged through patriarchal structures. Drawing on both personal narratives and folk tradition, I tried to poison whatever is destroying these existences with spells and rituals. I used incantations inspired by personal narratives that express dissatisfaction, or other magic practices in order to invite people to cope with desire's impossible horizons.
Φεγγαροντυμένη, 12 piece ceramics, 40x20cm, 2020. - For this 12-piece ceramic plate set I chose as a template a poem called 'The Cretan' by Dionisios Solomos written in 1881. I first encountered it when I was in my last class of high school, bound to analyze and decipher its hidden meaning in a way that would enrich my education. Revisiting the poem's implications, I focused on the characters' described profile and tried to give them voice in my drawings. I am pressing down clay pieces into slightly round plates, creating unrefined surfaces for coloring, which after two firings aim to imprison the drawn figures inside forever. This endurance to humidity or dust, points towards new ways of hanging around works, primary attempting to originate a bridge between the character's physical existence and the interactions or energies that are being releaedtowards any potential audience.
A Dream To The Wave, 2020 - Drawing resembles a ritual or an attempt to transform with magic. I never paint from memory or recollection but from nature. The scenery is derived from Papadiamanti's prose A dream to the wave, a text II first encountered when I was in my last class of high school, bound to analyze and decipher its hidden meaning. In the drawings, I drag the characters into mystical procedures to perform exorcisms and lierate themselves. I mixed mass and high culture into this 'potion', to overcome such boundaries, see these demarcations collapse, and build alternative interpretations and worlds from their ruins.
A Tinder Guide for an Authentic Love Experience - A collection of digital drawings are edited into a video that functions as an alternative guide for dating apps, in contrast with the ones commonly found across the internet, and mostly addressed to men. The advices range from emoji spells, to self-care routines or derisive interpretations of stereotypes within the dating culture. Each drawing is accompanied with a narrated direction which seeks to illustrate various pathways that provide mechanisms of coping with daily experiences of romantic frustrations or overwhelming feelings of uncertainty, connecting personal and collective struggles of living within a constant state of anxiety and fear.
No Tears Left To Cry - Popular culture images are being translated into woodcuts, attempting to produce an atmospheric blur iconography which points towards an enchanted kind of reality. While using only black and white, a possible could of fantasies and fears is being shared in order to displace oneself from normative longings, and open up a space for challenge and change. Although the images are not ready to abandon the romantic position, yet they are willing to show you that normalcy is not a place of rest, but an anxious non-place.
Become your own fortune teller 2019-2021 - The collages were made by reforming and reconstructing already found material, which was collected from women's magazines, self-help or personal narratives, Instagram accounts, romantic novels, tinder conversations and love song lyrics. Through the juxtaposition of them with the existing explanations of each card, I created my own deck in the form of storytelling plots and sequences. In multiple events I did Tarot readings as a way to unearth today ideas around dating culture, and examine current representations of love and passion. Someone could pose a question to the cards, and imaginary scripts would unravel shaping the current perception and emotions.
