Research Catalogue

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. 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 current outcome, and since 2020, of this project was that fictitious "daughter" of mine has been on the Met police's databases, as 22 Italian/Albanian female. I must have been given birth to a daughter in Albania in 2002! (!! the "prostitute"; that's believable!! 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. The records with the fake ID have been corrected in September 2024. 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 recently in the Netherlands. Greek children take their father's surname and the 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 - or whatever is left of it - and whoever is decent. 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 and the Tirane and Durres police. Thanks to Edi Rama. 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 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, Structuresm and Countermeasures", November 2020, available online.

Sculpture You is an act of becoming, an ongoing process of altering your senses and to reflect upon the attention, respect and care you invest while walking the sculpture trail. During the first act you transform into a temporary sculpture. During the second act you perform a ritual in front of each sculpture on the trail. For each of the acts, read through instructions prior to doing the movements.

I like to approach my body of work as being one big opera. Every object, wearable object or costume serves the opera. Every spatial costume a backdrop, every sculpture a prop, every wearable object a costume, every costume a character. One day I will make an opera consisting of all my works. Welcome to my world, welcome to my opera

PLAN TO UNPLAN is the work around the book BOOK OF CHORDS that serves as both artistic result and reflective component on several pieces I wrote between 2019 and 2024. The work touches thoughts about precariousness in music making and musical writing and the differences in chamber musical writing and orchestral writing. In the realms of these pillars there is a strong focus on expressions found in chords. Chords, sung mostly by amateur choirs and found on the internet.

My PhD project, ‘Things That Might Be True’, is based on Carl DiSalvo’s concept of adversarial design (DiSalvo 2012), which differentiates between ‘design for politics’ and ‘political design’. DiSalvo defines the former as design that simplifies and streamlines people’s electoral actions and interactions with municipalities, healthcare, and the government. ‘Political design’, on the other hand, sparks debate, problematises, and suggests new ways of exploring specific themes and concepts. DiSalvo’s concept is built on Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. I set out to question DiSalvo’s dichotomy. Through practical experiments, I expanded and processed adversarial design. My goal was to challenge the prevailing ideas in society on how citizens (should) connect with their inner political lives. My project examined how visual communication design might help devise new methods and tools for the public to approach politics, and, by extension, expand the conversation about democracy on a personal as well as societal level. Through public engagement, dialogue, discussion, and introspection, I explored ways for citizens to listen to and connect with their inner political voice. I conducted four participatory sub-projects: the lecture series ‘Things That Might Be True’; the Voices publication; the Inner Political Landscapes collage-making workshop; and the Political Confession workshop. The findings of these four experiments led to the development and materialisation of a fictional new department: the Stemme Department. The department's activities display the artistic outcome of my PhD project and illustrate how people can come together to reflect and engage in dialogue with their political selves. In early March 2024, the Stemme Department’s activities were presented at Bergen Storsenter and Bergen Public Library during a four-day event, which included an exhibition, a workshop, and lectures. My project expanded the dichotomy of adversarial design by suggesting the concept adopt an additional category: ‘political, political design’. Through an ambiguous and empathetic design practice, this additional category would mirror and borrow characteristics from both design for politics and ­political design.

Imagining Liberation is an artistic research project with the aim of investigating methods in speculative nonfiction. This project begins with a question: What kind of cinematic images can arise from imagining a liberated Palestine? Dalia AlKury’s interest in staging simulated pasts in her earlier documentaries and then staging speculations of futures during her PhD research stems from a deep frustration with the lack of art imagining a world that she hopes is possible. Both practices—staging in documentary and speculative fiction—are rooted in posing the question “What if?,” to offer another possible world or narrative. Her work combines these approaches in the realization of her own method in speculative multitemporal nonfiction. Dalia AlKury approaches documentary filmmaking not as a way of documenting reality, but as a way of constructing an alternative one. Her final artistic results are informed by a long legacy of politically poetic Palestinian aesthetics and by grievances over the historical and present day witnessing of the violent ethnic cleansing of her people. By committing to framing her vignettes in a fictional liberated Palestine, an emancipatory art making process starts to take shape. The process excavates an often-oppressed critical rage and pushes it up to the surface through different narrative tools. Imagining Liberation traces the filmmaker's confrontational journey while experimenting with staging, subverting, futuring, abstracting, and decolonizing to reach a type of catharsis in the face of a continuously fragmented diasporic existence. By staging her own return to a liberated Palestine in different modes from writing to filming, Dalia AlKury runs into ethical dilemmas questioning her self-censorship, representation of “others” and the elusive role of cinematic catharsis. This book encompasses her critical reflection on the short films , narrative experiments and video diaries created throughout her research. The three main audio-visual works that will be shared and analyzed are Congratulations on Your Return, Levitations, and What if a Tree, What if a Crow?