Research Catalogue

An overview of Elisabeth Belgrano's artistic / performance / research and teaching in higher arts education 2004-ongoing

Sketchbook of 53 A3 drawings with coloured markers, including 4 A3 collages with newspaper cutouts and printed photos. Sketchbook cover with red nail polish. 22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen. Preparatory work, 2023-2024. Although dealing with dark subject matter, I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012. This visual approach gives a slightly comical note to the otherwise dark subject matter.

Happening, 2016. Participant's empirical research, including improvised full recorded interview with first generation Albanian immigrants to Greece, images, and thematic text. The research was conducted for the workshop, "Logics of Worlds", inspired by Alain Badiou's work and organised by architect Filippos Oraiopoulos, at Athens School of Fine Art (ASFA), Master of Visual Arts (Marios Spiliopoulos, Giorgios Xiropaides), December 2016. Adopting the political approach of Badiou's "L' Organisation Politique" to apply direct intervention for societal problems, including immigration and labour, I used play as a method to facilitate improvised discussions. People share and respond more freely when participating in structured, but playful interactions, such as those a game involves. Albanians speak three languages, Albanian, Italian and, a few of them, Greek, so I wasn't able to translate parts of the conversation. Avlona is an English now obsolete name for Vlore, an Albanian seaport and former ancient Greek colony Aulon. Albanians came as non-EU refugees in Greece initially in the 1990s, after the fall of communism in their home country. Religion was banned in communist countries. The democratisation of Albania began in 1994, when Albanians protested for political pluralism in their country. At the beginnig ofbthe transition period after communism, Vlore became a port through which smuggling, mainly from Italy, was carried out. Notably, the men I spoke to didn't want to be visualised. Hence, the exposition aims to juxtapose the experimental and the conceptual in the fine arts; and to make the 'invisible' visible. Badiou is also known for his philosophy of metaphysics of the four "truth procedures": Politics, Science, Love and Art. The workshop was slightly interrupted by a performance art student, who brought a live hen to slaughter in the studio. This can be taken as a metaphor for scapegoating (by symbolically re-assigning the gender of male) Albanian non-EU refugees. For this exposition, I include an essay by Pantelis Boukalas, in Kyriakos Katzourakis, O "Dromos Pros Ti Dysi" (The Way to the West), 2001, as well as Kyriakos Katzourakis' introduction in English. I don't have any personal or other connections with Albania - or North Macedonia or Kosovo: I had never visited before 2024. This was a project to research and document in an artistic manner the refugee and immigration crisis, as I experienced it in my native Greece and to voice my opinions on this topic from my perspective as a native Greek. I spoke to non-EU economic refugees. Non-EU economic refugees must not be confused with political asylum seekers, who encounter persecution for political reasons from the countries of origin or citizenship. Albania (North Macedonia and Kosovo) is a non-EU country; Greece, my native (and my parents' and grandparents' native), has been in the EU since 1981. I have also been a UK national, by naturalisation, since 2011. Paradoxically - or not so paradoxically, since I have been also investigating this case - the political outcome, and since 2020, of this project was that fictitious "daughter" of mine had been on the Met police's databases, as 22 Italian/Albanian female. Supposedly, I must had been given birth to a daughter in Albania in 2002! (!! the "prostitute"; that's believable!! Or two "schizophrenic" sons, Panagiotis Nigiannis, both, Albanians!; born in 2003 and 2004! Golden Dawn's, the BNP's, and others' cultural "imagination" with regards to Albanians): factually speaking, in 2002, I was living in Athens, Greece, engaged to be married to my former husband, a Greek national, working at MOB (Mauve) Architects, as an architect designer, with an international cohort of colleagues. I got married in 2003. I lived in Athens until 2004, working also at RCTech architects. The records with the fake IDs have been corrected in September 2024. Including records of falsely alleged children of mine born 2002-2004, when I lived and worked in my native Greece. From 1998 until 2002, I was living in the UK, working as an architect; there are no children. I gained my first practical experience working as an architect in the UK, working in private architectural practice from 1999 until 2002. In 2009, when the G20 summit demonstrations took place in London, with the known case of the death of Ian Tomlison by a police officer, I had been living in the UK since 2005, working as an EU lecturer at the University of East London; I was also known as Betty Nigianni by my students and colleagues. I never participated in any public demonstrations in the UK, but I have attended demonstrations in my native Greece and in 2019 in the Netherlands. There are no children in my medical records, during the whole time I have lived in the UK, which is a total of seventeen years, plus, twelve of those being a British citizen. Greek children take their father's surname and Greeks don't have many children; they're suffering from a shrinking population, although they are in the EU since 1981. My concerns about serious international organised criminal activity (not even honouring children's basic rights) were reported and confirmed by the Greek, Scandinavian and Albanian authorities. The British authorities have been lagging behind for a long time, intentionally, with their impossible unverified "stories", bashing the left and the liberals - or whatever is left of them - and whoever is decent - whatever has been left of that, too. The Greek police confirmed in 2024 all claims about children, also between 2002 and 2004, have been dismissed. The Greek Golden Dawn - with their "Big Idea" (Megali Idea) of conquering foreign countries, like North Macedonia, and their chronic attacks on immigrants and refugees in Greece - was convicted as a criminal organisation in October 2020. They invented the 'concept' of the 'Real Greek', dependent on any Greek's political orientation. Now they're losing their sixty seven (67) appeals - and early releases. The conversation took place during the period Golden Dawn was prosecuted in the Greek High Courts of Justice (Areios Pagos), 2015-2020. Many non-EU immigrants to Greece provided testimonies in the courts, despite the fact they were frightened. Manolis Glezos was the only Greek politician, who went to visit Magda Fyssa, Pavlos' mother, in the Greek courts. For Pavlos Fyssas, aka Killah P. For Alain Badiou, a communist-Maoist political philosopher, and the OP. For the missing Albanian and of Albanian ethnicity immigrants. For Michalis Katsouris. For the "Other Greek Left". Thanks to the Albanian embassy in London, the Tirane and Durres police, as well as the Durres prosecutor. Thanks to Edi Rama. Thanks to the Norwegian government. Thanks also to Skopje police and Prishtine police. Thanks to the Italian police at Bari. Finally, thanks to the Greek police chief and the Greek police organised crime division. Thanks to the very few Met police officers, who eventually figured it out. Ongoing investigatory research with artworks, 2016-2024. References: Fred C. Abrahams, "Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe", New York: New York University Press, 2015. Counterextremism Project, "Violent, Right-wing Extremism and Terrorism - Transnational Connectivity, Definitions, Incidents, Structures and Countermeasures", November 2020, available online.

The perception of the canon of post-war Western art music today is still strongly determined by a constructed dichotomy which keeps Western art music separate from evolutions and radical experiments in jazz and African-American music. The very extensive oeuvre and philosophical body of thought of the American composer Anthony Braxton, what he calls his Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct (TCTUC), can be seen as the metaphorical elephant in the room. This unique oeuvre has been largely ignored to this day within the repertoire, discourse and performance practice associated with the canon of post-war Western art music. This research project takes Anthony Braxton's TCTUC as a starting point to see how I, as an interpreter of Braxton’s music, can contribute to a broadening of this canon. My intention with this research is to provide artistic responses to the gaps within the existing discourse on post-war Western art music (see Braxton, Lewis, Piekut, Born, a.o.) by approaching a wide selection of Braxton’s compositions on his own terms. By putting these works as specific case studies on the agenda of relevant actors such as the conservatory, contemporary music festivals and concert series and through recordings and other media, I aimed to make a canon broadening possible through my practice as an interpreter. The results of this research, presented in the form of concerts, lectures, articles, workshops and recordings, are collected in this Research Catalogue website.

As a child my father sung me to sleep with folk songs weaving pain, desire and death. This milieu was comforting and his circumstantial act (not a decision) shaped my sense that songs are a technology of meaning. Is meaning a word for perceiving the story with ourselves as a part of it? Plato told a story about how the dialectic will separate us from becoming a part of the cosmos. F. Scott Fitzgerald told a similar story about a man bound to an idealised concept of beauty who cannot find his way back to the cosmos of feeling. He cannot emerge into the pragmatism of what Catherine Malabou calls the “one life only”. A N Whitehead describes this as the event of the past emerging into the present into the future. Using song, I speculatively invite attendees to experience meaning inside the event. As a researcher drawn to Barad’s ideas of the intra-relational, I feel stories are the cosmos expressing itself. In stories, as with Plato’s Republic, we can accidentally describe the problem. Fred Moten is clear on how maintaining a reciprocal assemblage methodology in the lyric creates an ability to “stay with the problem”, “Let’s call it the scene of empathy. Lets call it the hesitant sociological scene. The scene of the in calculable rhythm. It is a scene neither of subjection nor objection. Looking with this hearing is a kind of building with or bearing.” (2017) My research, along the song lines of Whitehead, Moten, Deleuze and Guattari et al, has arrived in the region of singing in academia. I enjoy the irony of Katherine Rundell concluding in her essay in defence of books that when you make them inaccessible to a child, “you cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years… To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a stupidity for which we should not be forgiven.” We Invite You To Sleep With Us because my father’s songs were a gateway to the somatic experience of sleeping, a region where we are once more a part of.

The education of a classical violinist – or mine at least, and I see scant evidence that anything else holds today – begins based on a mainstream Romantic ideal consisting of works, geniuses, and concepts of musical authenticity. This is quite useful as a tool to cajole the young violinist into learning the essentials of tone production and playing styles but is at odds with a questioning attitude towards normative traditions that might allow the musician greater interpretive freedom after gaining that technique. While the historically informed performance (HIP) movement was an early, important manifestation of this sort of questioning attitude, the experimental/avantgarde tradition, which has run parallel to these others from the early twentieth century, has not often been applied to the interpretation of historical music. The experimental tradition does not assume conventional tone production or historical authenticity: instead, it is asking the musician to interpret the symbols on the page according to their own artistically informed predilections and contexts to produce new performances emanating from the artwork, thereby transferring more responsibility for the performance from the composer to the musician. To what extent might the experience of the performer be allowed to contribute to the performance of a historical work? As part of a three-year artistic research project in Stockholm, I have been looking into ways of using interpretive techniques gleaned from the study of new music and applying these to historical works. This article describes some existing research that questions the traditional interpretive paradigm, along with the ontology of a musical work and its interpretation, and concludes with a case study, “The Labyrinth,” showing one way that these sorts of attitudes can be put into practice for a genre of music to which they seldom, if ever, have been applied.