Highlights
video installation, moving stand, digital prints, Maraslio, Athens, 2024concept/video: Evangelia Danadaki
participating: Iga Koncka, Konstantina Tsagianni, Laisul Hoque, Ken Nakajima
Highlights is a multimedia installation based on a collective reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition(1958). The project highlights the dimension of plurality within the artistic process, reconceptualizing reading as a visual and performative practice of action and participation, and viewing as a practice of listening, reading and reflecting. By interweaving fragments of human intelligence (the readers’ highlighted pdfs’) with artificial intelligence (sound), the installation constructs a democratic mechanism of changes and exchanges that encourages viewers to participate in a viewing-now that evolves into a reading-later, facilitating a dialogic interplay between the self and the others, human and machine.
Ariella Azoulay underlines that the vision of spectators has been blinded, they prefer to avoid looking when the content it’s not entertaining.[1] The gaze today has been overpopulated by images and therefore I am interested in making multi-sensorial events-not purely objects of vision-where vision can take a break to listen, feel, think and wonder (towards an ecology of vision). I’m deeply drawn by Bracha L. Ettinger’s theorisation, engaging with her theory helps me articulate the visual into the discourse because it is impossible to displace the image from its (critical and theoretical) context. An image alone is never enough, it needs something to go with, not necessarily something that explains but complements it and offers depth (not meaning).
By reflecting on the matrixial prism, I refer to the mobilization of feminine desire which is not related to the phallic/Lacanian model of desire, where desire is equated to lack, but rather to connection: “the desire that corresponds to its activity is not for a lost object but for linking with the Other”[2]. The matrixial is connected to the designation of an encounter-event (reflecting on that of pregnancy), where the trauma of the other concerns the self and preconditions the formation of ‘subjectivity-as-encounter’. Understanding the field of art through the matrixial prism, means to forget the phantasy of the artist as an individual hero “in the service of male narcissism and identification” calling us to think of the artist beyond their individuality in a sphere of jointness, where “no hero can become creative alone”.[3] The matrixial encounter-event occurs when same vibrations—traumas, thoughts, feelings, desires— are being shared in compassionate hospitalityand co-responsibility.[4]
Art-viewing is a vital part of this work, the installation presents to the audience what has been lost in the video and sound, the process of each individual reading. The spectators are welcome to read and take home A4 papers with all the highlights made by the group. Highlighting arises as a form of digital painting that reveals parts of the participants’ subjectivities while introducing to the audience central questions and arguments of Hannah Arendt’s theorization of action. ‘Highlights’ conceptualizes and images intellectuality by documenting creatively an individual-and-collective reading that allows the viewers to experience theory differently – audiovisually. The image is displaced by colours and text. The colours reflect the colours of the highlights, and their projection in darkness is an attempt to generate light.
I began this project with the curiosity to re-raise the question of philosophy as an aesthetic practice by focusing on Hannah Arendt’s post-totalitarian theorization on the Human Condition. I wanted to test the transition from political theory to (political/artistic) action by designating a common environment of non-violence, where we can feel-think together, and appear through layers of immateriality–intellectual gestures–within a collective network of relations testing in praxis the Ettingerian theory of the Matrix, generating a new ‘matrixiality’, a reality informed by the matrixial theory that applies democratic ethics and aesthetics of connectivity, where we can exercise freedom with others. My aim was to test the dynamics of applying Ettinger’s and Arendt’s theory by directing liminal spaces based on participation, communication and action.
[1] Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008).
[2] Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, 90.
[3] Ibid., 175, 181.
[4] Ibid., 112.
By reflecting on the matrixial prism, I refer to the mobilization of feminine desire which is not related to the phallic/Lacanian model of desire, where desire is equated to lack, but rather to connection: “the desire that corresponds to its activity is not for a lost object but for linking with the Other”[2]. The matrixial is connected to the designation of an encounter-event (reflecting on that of pregnancy), where the trauma of the other concerns the self and preconditions the formation of ‘subjectivity-as-encounter’. Understanding the field of art through the matrixial prism, means to forget the phantasy of the artist as an individual hero “in the service of male narcissism and identification” calling us to think of the artist beyond their individuality in a sphere of jointness, where “no hero can become creative alone”.[3] The matrixial encounter-event occurs when same vibrations—traumas, thoughts, feelings, desires— are being shared in compassionate hospitalityand co-responsibility.[4]
Art-viewing is a vital part of this work, the installation presents to the audience what has been lost in the video and sound, the process of each individual reading. The spectators are welcome to read and take home A4 papers with all the highlights made by the group. Highlighting arises as a form of digital painting that reveals parts of the participants’ subjectivities while introducing to the audience central questions and arguments of Hannah Arendt’s theorization of action. ‘Highlights’ conceptualizes and images intellectuality by documenting creatively an individual-and-collective reading that allows the viewers to experience theory differently – audiovisually. The image is displaced by colours and text. The colours reflect the colours of the highlights, and their projection in darkness is an attempt to generate light.
I began this project with the curiosity to re-raise the question of philosophy as an aesthetic practice by focusing on Hannah Arendt’s post-totalitarian theorization on the Human Condition. I wanted to test the transition from political theory to (political/artistic) action by designating a common environment of non-violence, where we can feel-think together, and appear through layers of immateriality–intellectual gestures–within a collective network of relations testing in praxis the Ettingerian theory of the Matrix, generating a new ‘matrixiality’, a reality informed by the matrixial theory that applies democratic ethics and aesthetics of connectivity, where we can exercise freedom with others. My aim was to test the dynamics of applying Ettinger’s and Arendt’s theory by directing liminal spaces based on participation, communication and action.
[1] Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008).
[2] Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, 90.
[3] Ibid., 175, 181.
[4] Ibid., 112.
Self-images from a future that is already happening
multi-channel video installation, Inspire Project, MoMus, Thessaloniki, 2023
concept/video: Evangelia Danadaki
participating: Konstantina Antonopoulou, Albert Barqué-Duran, Evangelia Danadaki, Mikhail
Karikis, Akrivi Koukouli, Vagelis Kontos
concept/video: Evangelia Danadaki
participating: Konstantina Antonopoulou, Albert Barqué-Duran, Evangelia Danadaki, Mikhail
Karikis, Akrivi Koukouli, Vagelis Kontos
Self-images from a future that is already happening aims to create a digital public sphere, where the individuals who form and sustain it participate in a conversation that attempts to envision the future. A group of young artists was asked to respond to the image of the future and the significance that art can play in a contemporary discussion on climate change. A video installation generates and sustains this digital public sphere, within which a new collective thought-image is being formed.
Participation here means connection and communication, but also the capacity for distinction, the articulation of different perspectives on the same subject, exploring the layers of diversity and differentiation through the formation of a unified polyphonic body: the development of a shared reflection on the image of the future and on the significance an artistic discussion around climate change might hold. The participants digitally selected the effect for their self-image, subverting the logic of identity and the frameworks of truth production, allowing themselves to be mediated through technology. At the same time, by expressing elements of their own subjectivity within the work, they actively contribute to the synthesis of a new inter-subjective scenario about the future. It is a democratic gathering where no dominant “I” exists, but rather a group of subjects coexisting and contributing to the emergence of a new relational image.
Notes on Hannah Arendt
video installation, printer, michrophone, Central Saint Martins, London, 2022This installation, composed of a printer, a microphone, and a monitor showing the artist engaged in silent speech, explores Hannah Arendt’s theory of action by animating the human capacity to begin anew. Here, the subject is not a fixed or self-contained identity, but a relational being situated within a world that holds the perpetual possibility of re-birth. The silent figure on the screen resists speech-as-declaration, while the printer, mechanically repeating and producing without end, becomes a metaphor for potentiality rather than finality. Together, they gesture toward Arendt’s notion of natality: the radical openness of action as the site where the subject escapes definition and enters the realm of becoming-siatuared between others-viewers.