I am an artist working at the confluence of performance, sculpture, installation and my work is informed by disciplines including sociology, history and geography.
In my earlier work, most obviously Land (2004) and What About You (2007), I explored the relationships and conflicts between Tradition vs. Modernity, Global North vs Global South and the violence of capitalism as we know it today.
In 2007 I displayed a sculpture at the Love is Contemporary Festival in Terni and had the opportunity to engage over several days with the choreographer Cindy Van Hacker and some artists (including Nezaket Ekici, Dorte Strehlow, Lotte Linder & Till Steinbrenner) from the Independent Performance Group, directed by Marina Abramovic. Since this experience, Performance has become part of my practice.
During the last years I have worked on the theme of Representation of Ego. I been heavily inspired by Suzanne Lacy, an American artist, writer and educator, who in 1991 coined the term “New Genre Public Art” referring to public art (often activist in nature, and created outside institutional structures in order to engage directly with an audience). Ms Lacy aimed to define a type of public art situated in a park or a square that was not a sculpture and this is something which motivates me strongly. The definition was first used in a public performance at the San Francisco Museum of Art and later in Lacy’s book “Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art”.
The Feel of Think (2010 - 2013) is a nomadic and free-of-charge workshop based on portraiting. This project proposes an alternative system of self-representation based on inclusion and self-cultivation and is focused on storytelling. The production involved dozens of people in four countries: Egypt, France, Italy and Tunisia. It explored the history of stereotypes in the Northern and Southern Mediterranean countries and was co-produced by Marseille Provence 2013 / European Cultural Capital, was presented on previews in Townhouse Gallery (Cairo) and in La Friche la belle de Mai (Marseille).
Current Mood has been presented on July 2nd 2012, in Kassel, for the live performance sessions of Documenta 13 and curated by the American collective Critical Art Ensemble. The performance departs from Joseph Beuys’s Social Sculpture and was dedicated to the protests against the austerity measurements of the cultural activities in the western countries.
I am very motivated to look at how emerging art practices can survive and hopefully thrive in the midst of austerity, political instability or even wars. Inevitably the contexts result in major changes within the arts and lead to major challenges for lesser known artists or projects that are currently still building their audiences, to succeed.
Project RadioLondon (2015-2018) consists of a series of sound sculptures and site specific sound installations which form a gallery of portraits of artists that moved from Southern and Eastern to Northern Europe, especially in cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Dublin, Helsinki, London, Paris and Zurich. The goal is to connect physical places to a digital archive of documentary audio portraits following a program of performative and collaborative events which will be recorded and stored in a Web Radio.
Project RadioLondon is derived from Lacy’s “New Genre Public Art” and aims to engage artists in both physical places and in a digital platform. In other words, I would like to involve artists who are originally from other countries (especially Southern and Eastern Europe) and currently studying or working on the arts in Northern Europeans cities, or even just surviving. Furthermore, I would like to connect artists from different disciplines (in particular contemporary dance, experimental music and visual art), in order to attend to underexplored artists identities. My purpose is to produce a series of portraits of developers, pioneers and cultural activists who actually live the experience of mobility as a personal, social and political opportunity, and not as a deficiency. The project has been presented and supported by public and private institutions and festivals such as Villa Arson, Nice (2015); Manifesta 11 at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2016); Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, Harare (2018) and Terni Festival (2018) .
