recent activities
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' ("Paul V.") - January 2025 - March 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.
The Loot
(2025)
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Islington studio flat 4, at 14 Barnsbury Road, London, 2022, privately rented. Interior design and styling, as art installation. Looted, 2024. Investigatory research with artworks, 2023-24. Interactive research blog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_(magazine)
My personal belongings were still at the property for two months, after I left on 27 March 2024 and was asked to collect them by 3 or 4 April from Woolwich. After I left, the landlords moved in two or three under aged, who I have never met, so that they pretend to be my daughters. Subsequently, they must have been 'removing' them one by one over the last few months and until October 2024.
The company behind 14 Barnsbury Road was deemed illegal through the courts, on 22 April, 2024, shortly after I was forced to leave at the end of March. The maintenance employed many Polish citizens, all dressed in black with black caps, adopting the XRW supporters' fashion code. The household of tenants was mixed and multicultural, but mainly British natives, with the exception of a couple from Hong-Kong, an American citizen, and myself, a naturalised British citizen, originally from Greece.
Twenty-one (20+1) digital photographs of the studio, for twenty (20) missing Albanian and of Albanian ethnicity, non-EU immigrants; as well as one (1) missing Italian citizen. Golden Dawn has taken responsibility.
The twenty-one persons whose details got stolen were abducted by mainly Golden Dawn and, secondarily, the NRM; they are deceased. My personal details were stolen, too. Was I going to be the twenty-second victim?
Twenty-two (22) and twenty-three (23) photographs, including 2 (two) plus one (1) of myself: NOT a missing person, from the 2022-2023 period in the eventually looted, in spring 2024, Islington studio.
Golden Dawn were originally pagans, drawing from the ancient Greek mythology and ritualistic practices, including human sacrifice.
The visual imagery and the art included in the photographs is influenced by the marketing and advertising industry; I brushed shoulders briefly with students in the creative industries teaching at the Winchester School of Art. I used this an ironic commentary on Golden Dawn trying unsuccessfully to create a brand through propaganda, not political marketing.
The art world has been traditionally male dominated. This has not changed dramatically in contemporary art. Female artists have sometimes adopted male attitudes, or personas, to break into the art scene; see Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin from the YBA movement. I hold the view that art is not gendered, that there is no art for women or so-called women's art. Good art transcends such categories, tapping into more universal experiences. Saying this, I would like to quote Nancy Spero, who doesn't crudely distinguish between male and female art, as follows:"What if the default gender for 'artist' were female? What if, when we looked at a work by a woman, we said to ourselves, "That is art," and when we looked at a work by a man, we automatically identified it in our minds as 'men's art'?"
In 1999, I wrote a long essay about the architectural uncanny, which I submitted as my graduation thesis for my first MA in architectural theory. I called it "Space as a 'Bad' Object: A criminal investigation on the notion of space". I got inspiration from detective novels and real-life crime stories. The long essay was about the role of architectural space in crime. It was completely unsupervised: I received a distinction by a Bartlett staff member. I took the digital photographs in conceptual adherence with that essay.
I was a postgraduate philosophy student 9/2017-11/2019 at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
In this exposition, I include new photographs from a series of digital photography called "Forensics", taken with my mobile phone, after I was forced to leave the Islington property I was renting, on 27 March 2024. I gave the photography series that name, because it has served the purpose of investigating, recording and tracking a crime, for which architectural space, such as private rentals, has been used.
For Chris, my former neighbour, who was suddenly transferred by his employer, from London, where his daughter lives, to somewhere outside of London; and for Lawrence, a second generation immigrant from Nigeria, whose temporary post was prematurely terminated, though he was planning to return to his legal studies. And for Ali. And for Oliver, also my former neighbour. In memory of Howard, also a tenant at Bellview, and former neighbour. To all those who don't just "play" the cultural and racial diversity clause; they don't just rely on identity politics, because the class problem has not been resolved for them, either. Saying this, the UK must still be scoring high on racism, especially for people of African descent.
A Nigerian was amongst the Golden Dawn victims of assassination in Greece.
I was listening frequently to Massive Attack, a British trip-hop band, when I was living in Islington.
Sophie Calle is a French writer and photographer, working on themes of identity, intimacy and everyday existence. Her work is partly inspired by the detective fiction genre.
recent publications
The Opener - sharing the performer’s process
(2025)
Einar Røttingen
The Opener - sharing the performer’s process was a one-year artistic research pilot project (March 2024 - March 2025) funded by strategic funds at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Music and Design, University of Bergen. It was part of the Grieg Academy Research Group for Performance and Interpretation (GAFFI) together with external members from The Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. The project consisted of 8 sub-projects and educational activities, involving different instruments: piano solo, violin, duos with voice and piano, clarinet, accordion and guitar.
The term opener can in this project proposal symbolize a three-fold meaning connected to the music performance field. This project seeks to
- see the performer as an opener of musical meaning in a performance (interpretation of musical intentions in scores and improvisation)
- challenge ourselves as performers as openers that share his/her artistic work (getting insight into the creative process and methods)
- finding openers as tools to reveal and show the creative process of performers (ways of showing the artistic process)
Fragments of Rotting Sounds
(2025)
Thomas Grill, Till Bovermann, almut schilling, Astrid Seme
"Rotting Sounds – Embracing the temporal deterioration of digital audio" (https://doi.org/10.55776/AR445) was a multi-year research project that dealt with various aspects pertaining to the deterioration of digital audio.
Grill, Schilling and Bovermann understand this decay and the resulting products as a new and welcome aesthetic. This occupation with decay ultimately led to all residual materials being collected during the research period: From yogurt cups and spray cans to hard disks, USB sticks, cables, and clothing. This heap of waste was finally shredded and transformed into paper. Formally and in terms of content, the book explores decay and dissolution, thereby challenging the traditional aesthetic of collecting and preserving. The quantity of paper produced also determined the edition size, which is only 20 copies. Each copy bears the traces of its origin by embedding the cycle of transformation in its fibers.
Parallel to the physical book edition, a digitally eroding open access version is available for download via this Research Catalogue exposition.
The text by Thomas Grill refers to some of the key points of the Rotting Sounds research project and celebrates the open-ended nature of the experimental research.
Ocultismo Desapropriado/ Disappropriated Occultism
(2025)
Carolina Albuquerque
“Ocultismo Desapropriado”, é um ensaio que dá continuidade na investigação no ambto do doutorado em Artes Plásticas na Universidade do Porto. O presente ensaio volta seu interesse sobre os fenômenos perceptivos que decorrem desde a ação realizada com a obra "Congá Fora do Tempo, relacionando a experiência do fruidor presente nas duas obras. As instalações atraem o espectador para participar da obra e interagir com ela através da ação. Ambas as obras se relacionam ou são inspiradas em algum ritual de matriz religiosa, mas não repetem ou imitam esses rituais, tão pouco tendem à simulação dos mesmos. São ações de arte com o intuito de provocar o toque em seu íntimo através da brincadeira de fazer pedidos e desejos.
Esta publicação compartilha das mesmas referências bibliográficas do ensaio "Congá Fora do Tempo".
----------------------------------------------------------------------
‘Disappropriated Occultism’ is an essay that continues the research carried out as part of the Doctorate in Fine Arts at the University of Porto. This essay focuses on the perceptual phenomena resulting from the action carried out with the work 'Congá Fora do Tempo', relating the experience of the viewer present in both works. The installations invite the viewer to participate and interact with the work through action. Both works relate to or are inspired by a religious ritual, but they don't repeat or imitate these rituals, nor do they tend to simulate them. They are artistic actions intended to provoke an intimate touch through the play of making requests and wishes.
This publication shares the same bibliographical references as the essay ‘Congá Out of Time’.