© Tasos Gkaintatzis
Artist statement
VIGIL is a collective composed of Despina Sanida Crezia and Fotini Stamatelopoulou. With a background in Humanities (Despina in history/archaeology and Fotini in psychology/performance psychology), combined with a craving for exploring movement, research and performance, their work is based on new media and millennial Internet culture, from a spectrum that explores the culture within they have been nurtured alongside its fast access to information. Their collaborative work is driven by popular internet trends which they use as performance material investigating the superficiality of pop internet culture, merging it with intimate and mindful physical practices. As a result, they are interested in the notions of labor and effort through the body. Beyond the pop mindset of ‘no pain-no gain’, effort inside the performative process is used as a tool that helps to uncover what lies underneath and expose the mental and physical intimate personal elements of each performer. The performance is the output of this process of becoming and sharing. The body is used as a living archive of memories, stimuli and emotions revealing new perceptions of body image each time.
Despina Sanida Crezia and Fotini Stamatelopoulou (VIGIL) started their collaboration in 2021. Up to this day, they’ve established their collaborative connection through the project ‘Invisible Futures’ (2021) by DETACH collective for the Athens Biennale, the performance ‘HOWEVER’ at Tavros.space gallery (Athens, 2021) by Sanida Crezia and the ‘HOWEVER’ workshop at Duncan Dance Research Center (Athens, 2021), two online choreographies for Movement.Radio (Athens, 2021), and the performance ‘optimal.soft’ by Fotini Stamatelopoulou at ONC9 in Onassis Stegi (2022). In the summer of 2022 (July 2022), their work-in-progress ‘[a] border of dying’ will be explored and formed in a residency at the AADK network in Centro Negra in Blanca, Murcia (Spain).
Afroditi Psarra’s work focuses on the interweaving of art and science through the creation of artifacts through a critical lens. She is interested in the use of the body as an interface of control, and the revitalization of tradition as a methodology of hacking existing norms about technical objects. She sees the praxis of crafting technological artifacts as an act of resistance against black box systems. One that contains embodied knowledge and carries oral histories of intergenerational practices with it. Her practice builds on and extends the work of Cyber and Techno-Feminism(s) and the idea of female bodies as matrices of binary information. Drawing on feminist hybridizations of information and materiality, and the idea of SF (String Figures, Speculative Fabulations, Science Facts, Science Fictions, etc.) as articulated by Haraway (Donna Haraway: SF, Speculative Fabulation and String Figures: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 033, 2012) She juxtaposes the fragility of textiles(its physical and metaphorical softness), with the hardness of data systems (physical infrastructures that support data collection and archiving). Her work has been presented at international media art festivals such as Ars Electronica, Transmediale and CTM, Eyeo, Amber, Piksel, and WRO Biennale between others, museums like EMST in Athens, Bozar in Brussels, and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and published at conferences like Siggraph, ISWC (International Symposium of Wearable Computers), DIS (Designing Interactive Systems), C&C (Creativity and Cognition), and EVA (Electronic Visualization and the Arts).
In 2022 Afroditi Psarra and VIGIL have come in contact in order to bring their practices together. What connects us is the idea of the hybridization of the human body treated as an interface of stimuli and control.