Research Catalogue

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.

Atelier Nomade is a research seminar around the practical use of lithography outside of the printmaking workshop.

Happening, 2016. Participant's 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 refugees in Greece initially in the 1990s, after the fall of communism in their home country. Religion was banned in communist countries. 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 re-assigning the gender of male) Albanian 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); I had never visited before 2024. This was a project to research and document in an artistic manner the refugee and immigration crisis in my native Greece, but also to voice my opinions on this topic from my perspective as a native Greek. 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. I spoke to non-EU economic refugees. Albania (and North Macedonia) 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, the outcome of this project was that fictitious non-EU son(s)/daughter(s) of mine have been (since 2018) on UK police databases, as disabled 14, 19, 21 year-old transgender Italian/Albanians. Maybe I was married to a Nordic neo-Nazi, who was living with one of them since 2013 in London? Dismissed. Or did I have the one that came to the UK in 2017, who is the daughter of a known (not to myself) former Greek politician? Dismissed by the Greek authorities. 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 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. The work is in progress.

Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. BA Photography. The research paper serves as a base for understanding the memories on a case of a person with dementia and their connections to the medium of photography. Photography is used as an attempt to retrieve my grandmother’s autobiographical memories which are often hard to retrieve. It is based on the assumption that every memory, no matter how vague, is still accessible by restoring to a proper process, similar to the latent image on the photographic film that becomes visible only after appropriate processing. Based on existing experimental memory research I constructed a method of finding a cue that can trigger specific memories in a conversation. Photographic images from the past were used as a base of the conversation. In most cases, they didn’t directly trigger involuntary memory, but they served as a starting point for a conversation, allowing my grandmother to start actively thinking about a period of her life. Due to dementia, the responses within one conversation were often repeated, yet after some time, the chain reaction of retrieving memories allowed her to remember some specific details. Her understanding of the fragility of memories was constantly present. On multiple occasions, she expressed that an artificial device, such as photography or writing, should be used to preserve them. The research doesn’t give a complete understanding of how memories and their retrieval work in general, but it gives a better understanding of how it can efficiently be done with my grandmother. The process I developed can be applied to other people if properly adjusted to them. I believe that essentially what counts is not what kind of cue we choose, but that we patiently take time to listen and guide conversations with some previous knowledge about their past.

Over the past few years, fires are everywhere. The summer of 2023, the biggest wildfire recorded in Europe torched large swaths of Northern Greece; fire destroyed ecosystems and devastated local communities. This research paper is divided into two parts; the first part is based on fieldwork conducted in the fire-altered landscape in Evros, after spending time in Kirki village, hearing the stories of locals, having conversations with experts, and documenting my experiences living in the post-disaster land. It is a travelogue to a ground considered “ruined”, in a village slowly disappearing. The second part zooms in on Kirki’s cemetery, approaching it as the sole spiritual place for post-disaster relief in an effort to understand its importance for the community as well as the opportunities that arise in this burial ground. My travel was approached with a commitment to flexibility and was shaped by serendipity. In this multilayered condition of Northern Greece, it is an effort to consider the question of what’s left in the post-fire land of Kirki and what emerges in its damaged cemetery.

at the end of the sentence, it rotted gathers written words and photos exploring how language is not purely about communication, but a medium of revealing hierarchy of bodies, as we assign and circulate signs to bodies - none of which are neutral. Moving between auto-theoretical poetry and essays on 104 pages, I write with an I using language to explore language itself from within; appropriating how words are never innocent, when the languages we speak are the ones with political value.