For the past five years, I have been focusing my artistic practice on an exploration of abstraction, novel media & new technologies. Influenced by the Dusseldorf School, my visual art expands on the understanding of machines as industrial archetypes, giving them agency and exploring their locutions and mistakes. The abstractive minimalism that is distinctive of Untitled (2022), follows my artistic process, which involves recording the communication between human and machine. Thus this work is in line with a post conceptual approach, where the technological requirements for this recording inform and predict both the medium and to some extent the aesthetic approach. At the same time considering, my wider practice of urban archaeology, which has informed my photography for over 20 years, the recording of the agency of machines, through their self-regulating functions, and their correlation to their human-operator, questions the arrival of the new industrial revolution and explores various implications of the Anthropocene.
Regarding my photography, which explores themes of temporality, memory, and landscape, the recording of architectural and sculptural elements of the landscape, or the familiar and mundane in everyday life, contribute to the wider discourse of ruination and monumentalisation. In-situ photography allows me to intuitively engage with my subject matter, alongside extensive research, allowing it to unfold over time, as evidenced by my works: T-factory (2018), The secret life of the machines (2017), and carpe diem (2016). The aspect of urban archaeology present in those projects can be understood through the process of semiophoric change, which is captured in the monumentalized machines. In recording these out-of-use machines and through their intended display, the machines are now bearing new meanings, as they are deprived of their previous functions and recontextualized. I choose to focus on their materiality, while introducing new scenographic elements to their solemnly commanding forms, offering a new understanding of the machines as monuments of the short past.
In the project In the making (2020), which was exhibited at the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, I was able to expand on this, by developing a discourse with the past as it is experienced through the present. It is considered a sensible method to search in the present for traces of the past, however, one might end up finding only the present. Therefore this building biography proposes a different understanding of the shaping of future reality from the present, as it explores the construction phase of the museological space, where multiple unexpected narratives are encountered, in the otherwise very quiet modern museum.
Lately, alongside the artistic, another practice has emerged entitled “Mediterranean flux”. This practice develops on a curatorial level but more importantly, it is concerned with an epistemological break that shifts the gaze outside the Western-centric imagination of the Mediterranean. Its first occurrence was the exhibition “Mediterranean flux”, presenting photographic works mapping the cultural, ideological, and geographical landscape of the wider Mediterranean region. The exhibition was part of the 1st Mediterranean Culture Festival, Cultures in Between, in September 2020, on the Island of Naxos.
These past twenty years, urban archaeology has also informed my practice through the recording of material traces in the landscape, and their affective melancholy, as in The school project (2014), or in my latest project, Under construction. The ecological crisis was the starting point of the latter project, through which I was able to transform found or collected waste into a sculptural reinterpretation as well as a critical reflection on modern consumerist societies.
The documentation of material traces in my era as contemplations on temporality, materiality, & the Anthropocene, which never cease to inspire me, currently present opportunities for the articulation of new stories that will connect unexpected ecological, social, and political frameworks.
