ACROSS THE VISIBLE AND THE AUDIBLE, STILL AND DYNAMIC. INNER AND OUTER BODY.
The human figure and the exposure of its more visceral interior aspects are the inevitable output and core of my interest. My work consists in a blend of practices rooted in movement and vocalisation, as well as drawing and printmaking. The diversity of medium (from dance to sound and visual art) influence on one another and impact the appearance of each work accordingly; from the more gestural and immediate dance and improvisations or free-hand drawings, to less direct modes such as photography, video and printmaking.
The essence of my work emerges from doing: I practice, try-out, insist on what does not seem to work.
At present my focus is on the projects Hesitations, which explores sound and voice-movement integration, and Side FX, consisting of images derived from live performance, that merge digital photography, drawing and experimental printmaking.
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Finnish-Italian by birth, I am based in the Netherlands, after gaining a BA(Hons) in Dance-Theater at Trinity-Laban conservatoire for music and dance (UK 2010), and an MA in Performance Practice at Home of Performance Practice, ArtEZ (NL 2021). In Amsterdam I am AiR at OT301, where I run a project space, namely 4bid gallery, which supports and facilitates exchanges between artists engaging with the mediums of performance and visual arts.
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Over the past few years, sound making and the use of voice have became a relevant part of my artistic practice and performance making. I am inspired by learning over and over how to perform when out of my comfort zone. This state of not being fully in control and the tension it creates when looking for anchors are catalyst for my research, for the most part centred on doubt and confusion.
Daily discomforts, awkward encounters, uneasy relations, spaces that are difficult to perform in, performativity of doubt and of monstrosity (in its larger sense: de-formity / irregularity). Recent projects involve the exploration of voice as a limb, where sound is produced through vocalisations that originate through internal-organ work (see ATE methodology and VMI practice), include the integration of acoustic and electronically distorted voice as well as amplified and distorted bass-guitar sound, tuning and de-tuning body, voice and instrument, in search of the raw, the cracked, the irregular, de-form.
My practice-based research “Between a Kick and a Cuddle: A FLUID-METHODOLOGY BASED ON DOUBT AND CONFUSION,” focused on generating a fluid-methodology to help dancers identify their habits, to challenge their ability to attend to multiple stimuli at once, and to provoke situations which embrace confusion, doubt and uncertainty. This work focused on integration of states of doubt and confusion, decision-making and an embodied cognition emerging from these, with the aim of rendering dancers resilient to the appearance of discomfort and able to share the uncertainty it may provoke, in real-time performance.
In terms of visual art, the past five years brought me to work incrementally with charcoal and chalk-drawing, and experimental printmaking; the former as a way to bring the body in dialogue with a 2D image, which in the case of charcoal has the potentiality to ever-change (as it does not stick to a surface until fixed) and update itself in real time to the body in performance, and the latter as a way to register these improvised gestures, in-printing them as a multilayered collection of events, functioning as an archive of transliterations.
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MISSION STATEMENT:
A mover inspired by change, by circumstances, by a fight against coherency.
I should not know what I am doing, and feel most nourished by not finding out, by fighting against the natural will to understand. Not keen on defining, but discovering. Discovery is undefined.
I move by feeling, yet require a reason which may be given by a physical need or an intellectual problem that seeks solving.
Movement provides an intangible solution to both kinds of problems. Body responds to questions. I like solutions, not answers.
Solutions are open. I am interested in opening, beginning, finding solutions to un-asked questions, de-defining problems, making more options rather than narrowing anything down to fewer possibilities.
I am not interested in method, but method is necessary even for a one-time experience. I am interested in one-time experiences with one-time methods.
Disposable formulas.
No settling with one technique, but making the inconsistency the technique to experience each occasion uniquely.
Is method necessary? Is knowing necessary? Is formula necessary?
These the questions, that move my research forwards and this frustration, the impossibility of escaping formula, are those which lead me to continue looking for ‘other’, ‘unstable’, ‘restless’. It’s not for training, for learning to do anything better, rather a mission to keep the waters moving, not to settle, just for the sake of not settling.
I don’t have a goal, I have a mission and it is not for my life but for the waters and the winds never to stop. It is for LIFE.
It is simple, yet indescribable. It’s the flow of life, non stop need for motion. I need to confront and share visions on what is not, what is not yet, which will inevitably be, and I want to delay it.
To evolve and change, to keep open and available
To make my practice sustainable and lasting
To collaborate, to keep mentally and ethically elastic
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photo credits: Fenia Kotsopoulou, Gill Latoyah
