I am a visual artist from Greece based in Athens. Working across moving image, installation, performance, painting, drawing and text, and in dialogue with misinterpreted psychoanalytic and philosophic concepts, I invent non-linear narratives to interrogate one’s relationship to the Other. I am interested in the multiple forms this Other can take, such as of language, society, the law, one’s own self, or simply of another. Through examining these relationships, I explore themes around integration, queer identities and power systems.

My work aims to access a pre-oral knowledge residing between conscious and unconscious realms, often depicting the clash between reality and fantasy. At the core of this clash lies language, which either manipulates or gets manipulated in its attempt to symbolize non-articulated perceptions and desires. The distorted use of language in my work necessitates the disassembling and reassembling of meaning. As far as feminism opens up space for a different kind of knowing, I see this process as feminist. Although my research is informed by feminist theory, its influence on my work is structural, rather than a topic of concern. I see femininity as an existential condition rooted in all human beings through which we can access chaotic worlds that escape the order of language.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
Touch explores the ever-shifting nature of identity by examining notions of love and violence, power and submission, touch and distance. How much must one conform, and to which rules, to be considered a person? Does ‘I’ have to turn against oneself in order to meet external expectations and become? There is no self if there is no other. Ways of looking and being looked at, are central to this work.

Touch’s frames have been drawn swiftly using both my hands, following highly informal, gestural, and improvisatory procedures. There is no distinction between the research and the production stage in the way that I work. I try not to obey an organized thought or idea that I want to carry out, but to let a more chaotic friction of all the sources that constitute the research and creation process lead the stages of it. My fascination lies in capturing the essence of this raw, formative stage where identities are in flux. Rather than focusing solely on the final outcome, I am drawn to exploring the foundational elements that shape the evolving self, or, the evolving art piece. My intention is to access and communicate the sense of the place that we are, before we become. I see my approach to making as a form of resistance towards conventional cultivation.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
I will produce a new project, through which I am seeking to study the structure behind the body, the body being a person, a place, a condition. Working across moving image, sound, painting, drawing and text, I will be working on the fragments that will later form a transdisciplinary installation. Although I have occasionally combined these elements, I aspire to adopt a more ambitious and interdisciplinary approach for this project.

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