Research Catalogue

Abstract This thesis analyzes an original technique based on the transformation of ash into a self-supporting sheet suitable for charcoal drawing. The process, based on the use of sifted ash and powdered wallpaper paste as a binder, generates a lightweight, porous mineral support with a unique tactile quality, similar to a “combustion skin.” The research examines the technical, aesthetic, and conceptual dimensions of the material obtained, placing it in the context of contemporary art and practices that aim to stabilize ephemeral residues. The ash sheet is interpreted as artificial geology, a sediment constructed by the artist, and as a poetic device that intertwines memory, combustion, and rebirth.

This research stems from the need to give theoretical, methodological, and poetic form to a practice that has developed over time through intuitive experimentation, phenomenological observations, and a direct relationship with the material. The aim of this thesis is to define, analyze, and formalize a new painting technique based on a reactive mixture and a vortex modeling gesture, a technique that is not limited to using heterogeneous materials, but generates real visual phenomena: currents, stratifications, turbulence, figurative emergences. This technique arises from the encounter between everyday materials—malleable glue, transparent glue, toothpaste, Amuchina hand sanitizer, and pigments—and a specific gesture: the rotation of a cut brush that does not spread the color but sets it in motion, forcing it to react, organize itself, and take shape. This gesture is complemented by a final incision, made with a small object, which does not draw but frees the figure from the material, as if it emerged spontaneously from a dynamic field. The resulting painting is not representation but event. It does not describe a subject: it lets it happen.

The exposition includes reworked video excerpt from the 'Glass Cities' two hour-long video art installation, with film footage and photography from three different cities, London, Athens and Venice. The original work was created for Elica's live music performance, shown at the Small Music Theatre, Athens, Greece, in 2007. The aim of the process of making the video art was to remain and explore the surface of things when addressing historical changes. I used banal and seemingly unconnected photographic and digital film footage for this purpose and effect. The 'lure' is the film still: neither photograph, nor film, a notion that has been inadequately theorised in visual art history and theory. Following a historical materialist approach, I employ the artistic theme of dead cities. Venice is a dead city in the visual arts modernist tradition. A dead city is a city that fails to change. Venice is actually slowly sinking, because it can't manage the rising water levels. In this context, I briefly trace Venice's economic history of the flourishing academic arts in the Baroque period, its Murano glass industry evocative of the ancient arts and crafts, and its inevitable re-invigoration by virtue of the Venice Biennale, the well-known international art and architectural exhibition. I named the original video art after John Smith's experimental documentary about London 'Slow Glass' (1988-91). In the film, one of the narrators describes the liquid composition of glass - "even when it's hard, it's still a liquid" - which is a metaphor for the process of change. Since I made the video installation, but also this exposition, I found out that my ancestor, a great grandfather, who was originally from Italy, might have been an Italian Jew and that this might have been the reason he left Italy in the nineteenth century to travel to and settle in my native Greece. Because the exposition is about collective history and collective consciousness, the research video could be taken as a reminder of the factual, global rise of antisemitism in the twenty-first century; in Italy represented by the extreme right-wing, neofascist political group Forza Nuova. The country that has seen the most prominent rise in antisemitic ideology is the United States of America.

xeno-/exo-/astro -choreoreadings is a postdoctoral artistic research project that explores research questions that reopen site- and place-responsive choreographic practices by expanding the notions of ‘site’ and ‘place’ to outer space. The prefixes in the title refer to planetary conditions to which I do not have direct access. Another key choreographic exploration focuses on embodying hyper-reading and examining the impact of digital reading on embodied artistic practice. Hyper-reading refers to a computer-assisted, screen-based reading practice that has become common in contemporary daily life globally. It connects the reader to the limitless cyberspace. The research project blends these two spatial dimensions, in which the examination of the notions of choreography and choreoreading happen. The research process is multidisciplinary and hybrid in nature, producing artworks, traces, and reflections. The results are presented in this exposition as artworks and as reflections on the choreographic practice that this process has clarified. Download Accessible PDF

Playing the Mountain is an artistic research project investigating balance as the dynamic interplay of yinyang, through the practice of taijiquan (a Chinese internal martial art). Based on this embodied practice, I explore balance not as a state but as movement, by transposing this dynamic of opposing forces into a constellation of participatory, sculptural and expanded cinema forms. Drawing on principles of Chinese aesthetics from a diasporic perspective, Playing the Mountain deploys artistic strategies to consider agency, (non-)presence, tension, and resistance. This constellation traces unseen forces through kites, music, geological processes and Chinese calligraphy, gathering different ways to ask: what are the implications of understanding balance, not as a state, but as a process? This research project manifests through material investigations, martial arts practice, participatory exchanges and collaboration, as part of my broader PhD-in-Practice research project, undertaken at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The exhibition and writing workshop were presented in Summer - Autumn 2022 at Centre[3] for Artistic + Social Practice, in Hamilton, Canada, curated by Lesley Loksi Chan; the kite-making workshop was conducted in Summer 2024 at Decentric Circles Assembly in Warsaw, Poland (various sites), curated by the Work Hard! Play Hard! working group. Download Accessible PDF

I am a composer, musician and radio producer, and in this exposition I explore how I brought my artistic practice into dialogue with a cartographic approach called deep mapping to create a sound installation called ECOTONE: A Sonic Journey Through Kildimo-Pallaskenry. Deep mapping encompasses the discursive and ideological dimensions of a place, such as memories, imaginations and the multiple realities that exist in our surroundings (Bodenhamer et al. 2015; Roberts 2016; Biggs and Modeen 2020). The approach has spatial considerations and adheres to locations and boundaries, but what is added is a reflexive narrativity that includes the complexity of human stories and identities that exist in a place. Deep mapping has the capacity to bring together histories, mythologies, facts and fictions, and weave them together in expressing a place. In this work, which formed part of my practice-as-research PhD, I developed a sonic deep mapping approach that involves recording the music, sounds and stories of place, and re-imaging them through my composition practice. This research explores a new approach to understanding and representing place, and adds a new perspective to the field of deep mapping. I propose that my sonic deep mapping approach forges connections between creative process, people and place. It invites us to listen deeply to our surroundings and to create representations of place that bring us into the realm of imagination and connection. Download Accessible PDF