XRW (Implicature)
(2025)
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including:
3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos.
12 A4 drawings on paper with coloured markers, glued on A3 paper + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers, glued on A3 paper.
13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 two-sided.
17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers.
1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish.
1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside.
1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers.
22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen.
Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. The 12 A4 glued on A3 are preparatory work for a collage on panel.
I made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. Most of the research material came out of crime and fraud reports. I started writing the blog afterwards, since the summer of 2024.
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, to familiarise myself with elements of game design. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children. I wanted to emphasise that, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Adopting this visual approach, I also wanted to evoke a comically sharp twist, as satirical comment, in the British tradition of political satire, to the otherwise dark subject matter. Finally, the artistic style refers to the populist character of actors, mainly far right of the XRW, but also others.
The text is written like a trip-hop song. Parts of the analysis is inspired by Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's example of mathematical calculation. I used plenty of popular and less popular literary and philosophical references, for the visual art and in the writing.
Saul Aaron Kripke was the inventor of the possible worlds philosophical hypothesis, which was seminal for philosophers working in the area of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including the theory of counterparts and the theory of names. He died in 2022. Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist and gender studies scholar. She died in 2021.
In the style of art, I was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat's drawings and paintings, which are laden with input from popular media sources, like jazz music and television, recorded in an automatic and naive drawing manner, turned into abstracted paintings.
For Nikos ('Rama', 'Mr X'), Filip ('Philip'), and Brandon - August, September, and October 2024. For "Daddy G" and 'Eric' ("Her Man") - December 2024, January 2025. Who are not politicians, but are doing something political, so they must take care.
See also exposition "The Loot", under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.
Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation - Toward Non-Local Collaborative Art Practices
(2025)
Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Lucien Packer Yessouroun, Carla Zaccagnini
'Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation: Toward non-local collaborative art practices' investigates the resonances of concepts from quantum theory in the realm of transdisciplinary practice-based artistic research. Throughout a series of protocols using diffractive methodologies, we intend to translate and embody concepts such as spacetime, entanglement, non-locality, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and superpositionality, and embed them as tools for our artistic practices. These concepts were chosen for their singularity in physics, but also for the ways in which they confront ontoepistemic pillars of ‘Modernity’, such as sequentiality, determinacy and separability.
The research is carried out by a transdisciplinary non-local core ensemble formed by Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Packer, and Carla Zaccagnini. The cities we inhabit – Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and Malmö – have been our laboratories. Departing from tools and methods learned from each-other's disciplines, we have been creating scores that guide our simultaneous actions while walking on the street –interacting with public spaces and their characteristics– or while lying asleep –in the most private of spheres.
On the one hand, in a practice we call ‘non-local walking’, scores conduct our collective experiencing of our cities, involving a diffractive methodology of reading and listening, and the entangled collecting of objects, words and other affections found in the urban terrain. On the other hand, the ‘entangling dream practice’ experiment is an attempt without aiming at success of meeting each other in our dreams. Both investigations are conceived as boundary-crossing transdisciplinary methodologies through which we create a relational, critical consciousness and sensing that stimulates unexpected outcomes, embracing failure.
These scored performances have resulted in cartographies, drawings, moving sculptures, audio works and writings. Across these various materializations, unexpected connections, constellations, and coincidences e/merge, unveiling yet unheard polyphonies that give resonance to the urban and mental spaces, as potentized terrains awaiting (re)circuitry, and, as fields of forces that await to be (re)experienced.