FENIA KOTSOPOULOU
Selected works
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EXPANDED CINEMATIC CHOREOGRAPHY #1
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A DROP IN THE OCEAN (2024)
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"UNDER SCARS "(2022)
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''BODY MATTERS: CO-CREATION (2022)
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"STRATA" by VestAndPage (2021/22)
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Fluid Boundaries (2019)
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Fr-Agile Act #1 (2019)
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Dead butterlfies are still Alive (2019)
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Hundreds of words for love (2019)
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Before we forget (2019)
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300sec to cleanse your shame (2019)
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Cocoon (2019)
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Deviant Monsters (2019)
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Keep Seeking (2018)
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Acts of (un)plucking (2018)
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No comfort zone (2018)Scents of Evanescence (2018)
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Dance like everyone's sleeping (2018)
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Breaking through the (un)known (2017)
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Time reveals the way...silently (2017)
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AEGIS VI (Home II) (2017)
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What beauty feels like (2017)
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Apokalyptic Zeibekiko (2017)
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Reversed Territories (2017)
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Holding in, holding on, honding out (2017)
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Sexuality and gender in times of crisis (2016)
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CUNTCINEMA: From a Greek cunt's point of view (2016)
EXPANDED CINEMATIC CHOREOGRAPHY
This an experimental, duration-based exploration and artistic collaboration that unfolds over a day and night. The work integrates diverse technologies and methods, including an overhead projector, 16mm ELF projector, two digital projectors, a mini DV camera, a digital camera, and archival material.
Throughout the event, the artists engage in a dynamic interplay of filming, instant editing, and live feeding of the actions, drawing and performing. This process involves collecting traces and documenting new material generated in real-time and using it to feed the immersive environment. The performance evolves through continuous interaction with the various media, creating a fluid and immersive experience that captures the ephemeral nature of the artistic process and the creative dialogue between technology and live action.
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Performance #1: August 17-18, 2024 | open studio event ''SOMEWHERE HERE..." curated by daz disley | x-church, Gainsborough (UK) | duration 24 hours.
video link with documentation of the material generated during the event:
https://youtu.be/BBuruD0lJQQ?si=gIEpN-zudq5KoGn4
BODY MATTERS:
CO-CREATION RESIDENCY
Body Matters is a moment of sustained encounter where different artistic researches combine with performative responses to confront the emergencies of the present.The idea also arises from the desire to further qualify the C32 artistic space as a performative interface for the coagulation of inclusive, expansive stories; an open space that functions as a social-narrative incubator wherein performative systems and methods are intertwined in the search for new and unconventional expressive approaches.
WITH
Aldo Aliprandi (IT), Marianna Andrigo (IT), Irina Baldini (IT/NL), Selina Bonelli (UK), Daz Disley (UK), Marisa Gareffa (AU/IT), Nicola Fornoni (IT), Fenia Kotsopoulou (GR/UK), Ash McNaughton (UK), Joseph Morgan Schofield (UK), Sara Simeoni (IT/DE), Marcel Sparmann (DE), VestAndPage (Verena Stenke & Andrea Pagnes), Emily Welther (US/DE).
Location: C32 performingsarts workspace, Forte Marghera, Mestre-Venice
May 31 - June 10, 2022
For more information: https://veniceperformanceart.org/the-art-week/cocreation-residency-2022
photo by Lorenza CIni
Conference of screendance
Presentation of screendance works
Duration: 60min
Date: 20th October 2019
Venue: Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporanea (Valencia)
Context: International Meeting on Videodance and Videoperformance
In discussion with Blas Payri and presentation of seven screendance works
- itineraries
- Carriage return
- Catch me
- A cuppa with ancestors
- Waiting on the doorbell
- IN SIDE OUT
- This Dance Has No End
at the 6th International Meeting on Videodance and Videoperformance (València) at Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània CCCC.
A DROP IN THE OCEAN
Different iterations of a performance action / created in solidarity with Palestine, unfolding in two evocative parts: bloodstain on gauze and paper, and ephemeral writings.
Part 1: Using water and a finger as a brush, names of Palestinian sites, cities, martyrs, journalists, historical dates, and verses from Palestinian poets are inscribed on a reusable Chinese water writing cloth. As the text dries and gradually disappears, it symbolizes the transient nature of memory and resistance. The battle between forgetting and remembering.
Part 2: A lancet is used to draw blood from a finger, which is then deposited onto gauze. The act of allowing the blood to flow and stain embodies themes of grief, pain, marking both physical and emotional endurance, personal and collective memory of historical events that shape (our) humanity.
This performative actions reflects on the impermanence of memory and physical presence while honoring and expressing solidarity with the ongoing struggles and resilience of the Palestinian people.
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Performance #1: June 21, 2024 | duration: 4 hours | workshop with Marilyn Arsem: Considering Time, London (UK).
Performance #2: July 13-14 , 2024 | duration: 24 hours | x-24 Festival, Gainsborough, x-church (UK).
Performance #3: July 19th-August 16, 2024 |29 days of daily action/ritual | facilitated by Marily Arsem.
"STRATA" by VestAndPage
Honored to participate with contribution as performer, photographer, videomaker, at the fifth performance-based film project by the duo VestAndPage deals with Deep Time and layers of memory in human history and the geological.
In international collaborations and interdisciplinary processes, performance art, theatre, dance, visual art, and music meet science in human prehistory caves.
Concept, Production, Artistic direction
Verena Stenke, Andrea Pagnes (VestAndPage)
Director of Cinematography & Editor Verena Stenke
Texts Andrea Pagnes
Assistance, still photography Marcel Sparmann
Lighting director, cinematography daz disley
Cinematography Fenia Kotsopoulou
Sound design, audio arts Douglas Quin
Set director, drone operator Giovanni Dantomio
Masks, costume design VestAndPage, Balaustio.
For more information: https://www.vest-and-page.de/strata
photo by Marcel Sparmann
UNDER SCARS
Under Scars is envisioned and devised by the artist duos VestAndPage (Verena Stenke & Andrea Pagnes) and Andrigo & Aliprandi in collaboration with Irina Baldini, Sabrina Bellenzier, Giorgia de Santi, daz disley, Nicola Fornoni, Marisa Garreffa, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Ash McNaughton, Aisha Pagnes, Enok Ripley, Sara Simeoni, Mauro Sambo, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Marcel Sparmann and Emily Welther.
The experience of the collective performance opera Body Matters: Anam Cara – Dwelling Bodies in 2018 made us imagine a radically different direction for the VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK. We realised that the production of collective performance operas should be nurtured by artists-in-residences that provide time and space for the needed intensive co-creation processes. Under Scars grew from this insight as a collective performance opera and work-in-progress. It developed from Body Matters: Co-Creation Residency, a shared artistic research and a co-creative path undertaken by 15 performance and sound artists organised in June 2022 at C32 performingartsworkspace in Forte Marghera (Venice).
A collective performance opera
Saturday, December 17, 2022, 19:00h
European Cultural Centre | Palazzo Mora
Strada Nova Cannaregio 3659, 30121 Venezia (IT)
For more information: https://veniceperformanceart.org/the-art-week/under-scars-2022
FLUID BOUNDARIES
processional performance
Duration: 2 hours
Date: 18th October 2019
Venue: Playa Migjorn - Torre des Pi des Català (Formentera)
Context: ARCIPELAGO COLLECTIVE SIGNATURES III | 15-18 October 2019.
In the shadow of the tower whose purpose it is to enforce this boundary, this territory, I seek to modulate the very border which makes the tower 'necessary'.
Like the sea, I move stones and sand.
Like stone, I am moved and shaped by the sea.
I become a wave,
and with each oscillation boundaries are
(re)arranged,
(dis)placed,
(re)constituted,
(re)ordered.
With every movement of every grain of sand, the circumference of this island changes, because this is a much more fluid, liminal space than the rigid enforcement the tower is there to impose upon us. When the boundary moves, in a geophysical sense the territory also moves - contracting and expanding with each fall and rise of the passing waves : so what then of the impact on the political sense of territory ?
I am becomming the sea, and embodied wavefront.
I seek to be, with you : the agent of change ...
if just in a modest way, right now. here.
A meditative performance starting with stillness immersed in the sea, holding a broken stone and gazing towards the unknown and moved by the gentle waves as my feet search-out roots unders the sand. A collective procession follows where with each step Formentera's landscape is reconfigured and maps are (re)traced. Itineraries dissappear as new ones are formed around the Torre des Pi des Català. In the shadow of the tower, brief rituals take place.
What do I seek to activate?
What do I want to protect? for whom? and from whom?
What is left to defend? from whom? and for whom?
In the end, everything will fade out in stillness.
What is left is a handful of earth,
a grain of salt,
and an old stone.
"BODY MATTERS: CO-CREATION RESIDENCY (2022) [ph.Lorenza Cini]
"STRATA" performance-based film by VestAndPage(2021-22) [ph.Marcel Sparmann, Daz Disley]
FLUID BOUNDARIES (2019) [ph. Lorenza Cini]
MOVIMIENTO EN MOVIMIENTO #8
FR-AGILE ACT #1
LIVE performance via Skype
Duration: 9minutes
Date: 26th of October 2019
Venue: online
Context: Festival Internacional de danza para la pantalla | Movimiento en Movimiento #8
This performance is based on the ongoing series "Deviant women" exploring, exposing and subverting gender codes embedded within social identities. The focus of the performance is on fragility. The word fragile, often used to mark feminine emotionality, characterises someone who can be easily broken. However fragile also contains within it the word agile - the one who is able to move quickly and easily. If one is said to be fragile, does this then make them also by default : agile? Not just an act of identifying or locating agility, this performance seeks to celebrate this agility, without ignoring or diminishing its seat within fragility.
GlobalArtTogether | FACE TO FACE ed 2
DEAD BUTTERFLIES ARE STILL ALIVE
LIVE performance
Duration: 30minutes
Date: 11th August 2019
Venue: 5.18 Democracy Square Gwangju
Context: GlobalArtTogether Face to Face . Edition 2 | '數싸움 Psychologic Games' (South Korea)
Music: Sol Rezza
ph. Young-il Kwon
On my doorstep I found a dead butterfly staring into the void in silence.
On the surface of a black cube
Find a hand from the other side
Devour the fear
Scrape the shame
Inject the flower's pain and beauty's decay
The voice's gate shall stay open
Wrap your centre with fr-agility, make it your armour
Bite the sin with grace
Transformation happens in the dark
Dead butterflies are still Alive; they sip from muddy puddles, stare at you in silence
And then, they fly again
Seven actions in search of pathways towards change, performed on 518 Democracy Square's pavement marked by histories of resistance and resilience.
Action 1: 불안정
Attempting to balance on a small black cube. I extend my hand to be reached by someone. To find equilibrium at the shoulder of the other can be enough.
Action 2: 무서움
Writing on rice paper the word fear, whilst using the body of the other as shelter from the rain. Swallowing the paper slowly.
Action 3: 부끄러움
Taking out of my mouth a steal sponge. After pulling it apart I use it to scrape my chest.
Action 4: 고통
18 red roses on my arms. I remove the petals and I offer the stems to others. I crash the petals, I squeeze until their juice comes out. Using a syringe, I spill out the liquid onto the cavity of my neck and throat.
Action 5:취약성
I wrap my waist tight with a white and red tape on which is written the word: FRAGILE.
Action 6: 취약성
A green apple and a charcoal stick. I bite once the apple and with the rest off it I smash the charcoal on the pavement before stepping on it.
Action 7: 날개
I raise my arms. I dance.
The actions have finished. It still rains and someone from the audience helps me to cut the tape from my waist.
I can breath deeply again.
PROJECT ID – In Between Identities.
HUNDREDS OF WORDS FOR LOVE
LIVE performance
Duration: 45minutes
Date: 6th July 2019
collaboration with Daz Disley and Andrea Pagnes (V&P)
live sound and text: Daz Disley
Venue: De Helena (Den Haag, The Netherlands)
Context: PROJECT ID IN-BETWEEN IDENTITIES
ph. Jacques Martens
Collaborative participatory performance, exploring emergent expression of emotion and identity.
Sometimes we all struggle to express, because sometimes thoughts and feelings move to fast to be put into words, become somehow illusive, and so escape digestion and understanding. Working from a restricted basis rooted in Plato's seven forms of love (and drawing on months of direct-messages exchanged with a friend discussing our relationships and navigations) a limited vocabulary was constructed with which to create patterns, phrases and sentences expressing feeling. The limit to the vocabulary is a an attempt not to limit expression, but instead an invitation to find combinations which resonate with feelings in a more stripped-back sense - an attempt to steer the expression away from an infinite sea of passing unexpressed situations, and towards something which despite perhaps being less immediately authentic or representative, at least drives towards formulation, contextualisation, and therefore eventually understanding and acceptance of situation. In the context of identity, the philautia element of Plato's seven forms is something important to tackle in order to provide firm foundations for higher/deeper level identity-related discussion.
Collabroation
DEAD BUTTERFLIES ARE STILL ALIVE (2019) [ph. Young Il Kwon, Kang Cheol and Lee Jin Gi]
HUNDRED WORDS FOR LOVE (2019) [ph. Janques Martens and Aldo Aliprandi]
THEERTHA PERFORMANCE PLATFORM'19
BEFORE WE FORGET
mataka tiyāganna
durational participatory performance
Duration: 2 hours
Date: 17th March 2019
Venue: Borella Junction (Bus station) Colombo (SRI LANKA)
Context: Theertha Performance Platform 2019 | 15-18 March 2019.
*This performance was part of the cross-disciplinary on going project "SCENTS OF EVANESCENCE": a project on ephemerality, transient memories, remembering and forgetting.
Performing the anthotype process, using a bucket of red and orange Alstroemeria flowers, symbolising devotion and friendship.
The action consists on using first the petals and afterwards the leaves of the flower, placing them in a mortar and crashing them with a pestle. Once the petals/leaves become a pulp, I take the mash and by using my white clothes I squeeze it until the colourful pigment falls into the jug. The stains remain on the white skirt and shirt. I repeat the ritual in the midst of noise and and traffic.
Without instructions, eye contact nor explicit invitation, organically the passengers become participants. They take on their hands this ritual. They smash, they squeeze, they repeat..in silence we go through a collective process of colourful destruction and transformation.
The remains of the petals are used to write on the dirty pavement: REMEMBER[in sinhala: mataka tiyāganna].
During the following day 27 new portraits and texts on the question have been collected to be developed as anthotypes.
THEERTHA PERFORMANCE PLATFORM'19
300 sec to cleanse your shame
Intervention during TPP performance marathon
Duration: 5minutes (300sec)
Date: 16th March 2019
Venue: Theertha Red Dot Gallery, Colombo (SRI LANKA)
Context: Theertha Performance Platform 2019 | 15-18 March 2019
Trace the shame
Embrace its core
Purge what is clean and soft
and keep the sin
Water flows from the scars
while the body rest under the stars
The colour of Pain is green
The colour of Relief is green
Before both dissolve
And the time is up.
Action:Shalini Samaranayake writes on my legs the word SHAME in both English and Sinhala: ලජ්ජාවකි with green ink.
I stand in the circle. I cover my face with my hair and lie down on the pavement. I let the other read my legs. I take a stainless steel sponge and rub the words off.
I lie down again. The words have been disappeared but the traces are still there.
THEERTHA PERFORMANCE PLATFORM'19
COCOON
a collaboration with Sri Lanka artist
Lakni Prasanjali
Duration: 20minutes
Date: 18th March 2019
Venue: Theertha Red Dot Gallery, Colombo (SRI LANKA)
Context: Theertha Performance Platform 2019 | 15-18 March 2019
Wrap the black seed
Trap the black seed
Colours doesn't exist
Wrap the white seed
Trap the white seed
Colours doesn't exist
Restrictions inside a cocoon
Are dissolved through our breath
One but not one we stay silently still
Colour doesn't exist
And then the sound of ripping and tearing
Before you roll
Before I roll
We will meet again inside a new cocoon.
BEFORE WE FORGET mataka tiyāganna (2019) [ph. Lakni Kumarasiri]
300 sec to cleanse your shame (2019)
COCOON (2019)
#TEXT ME_FLUFFY LIBRARY
DEVIANT MONSTERS
audio-visual performance installation
Duration: 3 hours
Date: 25 January 2019
Venue: ATOPOS CVC, Fluffy library, Athens (Greece)
Context: art residency Fluffy Library | in collaboration with artist Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou.
Fluffy and Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou invited Fenia Kotsopoulou and Daz Disley to keep each other company inside Fluffy Library for 7 days and to discover various secret aspects of Fluffy itself.
What could you find out if you sleep in Fluffy and cuddle with the pink little horse for 7 days? What secrets will Fluffy share with you and what kind of stories pop-up from the library and become reality during the night? And when you ask for bedtime stories, will you hear the voice of Fluffy itself·before you fall asleep?
Every day they discover more and more : during the nights, hairy deviances dance and masculine fairies whisper fairytales.
A performative audiovisual get-together, with video by CUNTCINEMA and new fuzzy friends of Fluffy. CUNTCINEMA is the creation of a portable tiny cinema, which aims to display movies about identity, gender, body, shame and crisis.
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During the evening and for 3 hours the audience has the opportunity to experience a private 10min screening of CUNTCINEMA under the skirt of Fenia (designed by Antigoni and with the technical support of Daz) in one of the Fluffy rooms.
Venice International Performance Art Week
KEEP SEEKING
Durational performative (inter)actions
Duration: 5 hours
Date: 15th December 2018
Venue: European cultural centre-Palazzo Mora, Venice (Italy)
Context: performance opera: BODY MATTERS Anam Cara – Dwelling Body
The motion of the urge to keep seeking.
A place of longing and a place of belonging,
Both destination and journey.
A place where pain and joy, love and loss, self and other :
Meet, balance, connect, and melt together.
Safe vulnerability, permeable synthesis.
Love and complete recognition.
Never fixed, always in a process of (un)becoming.
A place of returning and location for the senses
— My bones, your bones, my skin, your skin —
Where we flow through each other.
A place of celebration, a visceral dance in a moment of suspension
Where known meets unknown : in silence, stillness.
Where we annihilate each other in the process of creating
Each other : together.
Your roots. My roots. Urgent and Emergent : deeper.
This place is home.
This place is where I dance.
F-L-A-T 5 sofa residency
ACTS OF (UN)PLUCKING
audio-visual performance installation
Duration: 5 days residency (2 hours shared event)
Date: 12-16th April 2018
Venue: F-L-A-t 5 (Nottingham, UK)
Context: sofa art residency, curated by Chiara Dellerba and Saria Digregorio
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one meaning of the word ‘pluck (up)’ is ‘courage, boldness’: I plucked up courage to express my inner thoughts [Harris, W. (1960), Palace of Peacock, i. 17]. ‘Pluck’ is also a verb: ‘to pull sharply or forcibly in an act of removal’.
For Sofa Residency at Flat5, I blend acts of courage and acts of removal, creating the ground for investigating body and shame. The residency is an opportunity to experimentally explore issues around body-hair and other societally-unwanted features of our physical experience – those which give rise to feelings of shame.
Which are the roots of our shame and what does it take to eradicate them?
If shame was another tangible ‘body’, what form, colour and shape would it have? How would it sound, speak, or look like?
During the residency, I offer one-to-one encounters and remote collaborations exploring these shame-focused topics, recording audio-visual material and creating a short video to be screened in Cuntcinema.
FLUFFY LIBRARY- DEVIANT MONSTERS (2019)
ACTS OF (UN)PLUCKING (2018)
KEEP SEEKING (2018) [ph.Lorenza Cini]
AUTUNNO DANZA
NO COMFORT ZONE
dance performance
Duration: 40min
Date: 9/10 November 2018
Venue: Teatro Marcello, Cagliari
Context: 24th edition Festival AUTUNNO DANZA (Italy, Cagliari)
No Comfort Zone is an interdisciplinary project, investigating the idea of contemporary creation as an interaction between different languages, and exploring the margins of non-comfort zone, or the risk as a fruitful part of the process, essential tools for the opening to new expressive possibilities. The performance plays on these states of ease / discomfort and on the possible solutions of exit from a situation - that of non-comfort - to which we are all daily exposed.
Concept: Sara Marasso & Stefano Risso
performance by: Sara Marasso, Stefano Risso, Fenia Kotsopoulou and Teresa Noronja Feio.
Visual material: Fenia Kotsopoulou
Music: Stefano Risso
X-24 Festival 2018
SCENTS OF EVANESCENCE
one to one performance
Duration: 4 hours
Date: 14 July 2018
Venue: x-church, Gainsborough
Context: Festival x-24 (UK, Gainsborough]
An one to one performance installation in which the participant is invited to have their portrait taken while they are asked a personal question in relation to memories. The answer to the question is written down and becomes part of a collective text in different languages. .Afterwards, the participant learns how to create an anthotype, a technique for developing images invented in 1842.
The portrait becomes part of the image and text collection of the on-going cross-disciplinary project.
x-24 Festival 2018
DANCE LIKE EVERYONE 'S SLEEPING
Durational impovisation-based dance performance in collaboration with Daz Disley and Mariam Frick.
Duration: 3 hours
Date: 15th July 2018
Venue: x-church (Gainsborough)
Context: Festival x-24 (UK, Gainsborough)
A durational dance & music improvisation performance in collaboration with Daz Disley and Mariam Frick which took place from 3am to 6am in the space of x-church, during the Festival x-24. The audience have the opportunity to experience (or dream) the performance whilst drifting from consciousness to sleep and viceversa.
How it feels to perform for a sleeping audience?
NO COMFORT ZONE (2018) [ph. Nino Sanna]
SCENTS OF EVANESCENCE (2018)
Venice International Performance Art Week
BREAKING THROUGH THE (UN)KNOWN
Durational performance under the mentorship of Marilyn Arsem.
Duration: 4 and 1/2 hours
Date: 16th December 2017
Venue: Palazzo Mora, Venice (IT)
Context: CO-CREATION LIVE FACTORY Prologue 1 | Venice Performance Art Week
A durational performance using only the feet whilst standing to tread and grind a single Venetian terracotta roof tile until it breaks and is slowly transformed back to dust, to "terra".
An act of persistence where vulnerability and strength, materiality and symbolism, surrender and perseverance: constantly overlap before the moment of breakthrough.
Venice International Performance Art Week
TIME REVEALS THE WAY... SILENTLY
Durational performance under the mentorship of Marilyn Arsem.
Duration: 6 hours
Date: 12th December 2017
Venue: Palazzo Mora, Venice (IT)
Context: CO-CREATION LIVE FACTORY Prologue 1 | Venice Performance Art Week
For each repeat, a pinch of sea salt is removed from a mountain of 4kg and is placed on the floor. With a little white stone, clenched in my right fist, I grind the salt meticulously until the grains become powder.
Pinch after pinch, here it is:
A thin, expanding line of fragmented personal and collective memories;
Pinch after pinch, here it is:
A subtle pathway without predefined destination;
Pinch after pinch, here it is:
A temporary map of a non existent place;
Pinch after pinch, I am still here...
5th Thessaloniki Performance Festival
AEGIS VI (HOME II)
Collective performance opera by VestAndPage
Durational: 1hour
Date: 21st October 2017
Venue: SMCA State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, GR
Context: 5th Thessaloniki Performance Festival.
The last part of the AEGIS Cycle is also the second part of the HOME Cycle.
AEGIS VI (Home II) is an act to honour the ideal force of a community striving to identify its lieu d'appartenance, while questioning the precarious umbrella of state systems and norms that ascribe conventional meanings to both the collective and places. It refers to Hestia, the Goddess of Greek mythology of the right ordering of domesticity, family, home and the state. The final collective performance opera – developed in collaboration with five Greek artists during a one-week residency at the SMCA – aims to reflect upon the collective in situ, as well as origin and distance.
With VestAndPage, Tomas Diafas, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Josephine Makris, Ariadne Pediotaki and Maria Zourou.
With the kind support of daz disley.
BREAKING THROUGH THE (UN)KNOWN (2017) [Lorenza CIni]
TIME REVEALS THE WAY... SILENTLY (2017)
AEGIS VI (HOME II) (2017)
CALA FEST 2017
WHAT BEAUTY FEELS LIKE
(intervention in collaboration with Isadora Tomasi)
Duration: 15 minutes
Date: 22 July 2017
Venue: Museo della Città e del Territorio – Giardino, Cori (IT)
Context: CALA festival 2017
Sound manipulation: Isadora Tomasi
video documentation: Daz Disley
photo documentation: Emanuele Bencivenga/Pia Maria Ciuffa
"What beauty feel like" is the slogan/logo of the famous hair removal product. A slogan that persuades the audience to believe that they will be “beautiful” as long they use this hair removal product for touchable, soft, desirable, extra smooth, moisturized and shiny legs that can proudly show off.
After the video work: "What beauty feels like", I decided to start a series of short live actions related to same theme.
In the context of CALA festival 2017, I did a 15 minutes "beauty mask" for hairy legs.
I climb and sit on the Pomegranate tree in the garden of the museum, after placing a big red tomato in one of the spiky branches of the tree. Isadora helps me by taking off my shoes. Then with a cutter I cut my black tights, revealing my hairy legs. Then the action consists on pouring slowly milk, oil and balsamic vinegar on them. At end I take the tomato and I squeeze it on the top of my legs. I come down from the tree, I water my feet, put all the remains in a metal box and I walk away.
VIPAW Workshop Series
Apocalyptic Zeibekiko
Duration: 2 hours
Date: 5th - 6th of June 2017
Venue: C32, Forte Maghera, Venice
Context: Venice International Performance Art Week | Workshop Series. Joint Performance Summer Class by La Pocha Nostra and VestAndPage, Venice, 2017.
The ritual starts with me lying down on the floor and asking the people who are present in the space to "ground" me by pressing gently every part of my body towards the floor. Afterwards they write on the back of my naked body their thoughts about the relationship with their body and gender. When they finish writing, I stand up, I step inside the circle of light and dance for an hour under the same song played in loop: "Zeibekiko of Eudokia" by Manos Loizos.
The performance is filmed by a camera placed on the top of the ceiling and the unedited version will be projected on the door of the C32 performing art workspace during the final public presentation.
Zeibekiko (or Zeybekiko, Greek: Ζεϊμπέκικο) is an urban improvisational dance from Greece.
Throughout history it has been known as an intensely personal dance where people can express their individuality. Only one MAN at a time may dance it. If another got up, it would be a cause for conflict and possible violence.
Here the same dance is danced by a female body to claim space, to expose and transform its vulnerability and to find a final catharsis.
An individual ritualistic dance, shared collectively.
x-24 FESTIVAL 2017
Reversed Territories
Duration: 15Hours (with occasional breaks).
Date: 15th - 16th July 2017
Venue/context: During the x-24 festival || x-church, Gainsborough
What once was considered a map of unity, now is transformed to a map of risk, danger and separation.
Action: Tracing with chalk the outline of the European map of the 28 EU members in a black board. Within 15 hours during the x-24 festival in Gainsborough, I used 2.500 golden drawing pins, placed on the board with the spiky part facing outwards, highlighting the border of each country. Some countries (Germany, UK, Greece, Italy, Portugal) were filled in with the same pins, also glued outwards.
In this action some curious kids and teenagers joined voluntarily and whilst gluing pins we were speaking about experience of traveling.
WHAT BEAUTY FEELS LIKE (2017) [ph.Emanuele Bencivenga]
APOCALYPTIC ZEIBEKIKO (2017)
REVERSED TERRITORIES (2017)
UNIVERSITY OF LINCOLN
HOLDING IN, HOLDING ON, HOLDING OUT
Durational site specific performance
Duration: 2 hours
Date: 24th May 2017
Venue: Architecture Building, University of Lincoln (UK)
This is a 2hours experimental intuitive site-responsive performance by Orinta Pranaityte, Fenia Kotsopoulou and Joana Cifre Cerda, exploring the different meanings of "holding" (in/out/on)
The performance took place around and on "The Fiftt plinth" just outside the AAD Building. https://www.thefifthplinth.com/about
GOLDSMITHS UNIVERSITY
Duration: 18min performance lecture
Date: 20th April 2016
Venue: Goldsmiths University (London)
Context: Symposium 'SEXUALITY & GENDER IN TIMES OF CRISIS: Live Art and Feminism in Greece' as a prequel to the live art night Deep Trash: Greek Trash (23 April 2016).
Invited artists Mary Zygouri, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Chara Kolaiti and 34es presented their practice to the public, to end with anthropologist Diana Manesi, who presented her field work on Athens’ queer communities through an auto-biographical cross-genre narrative.
Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club
CUNTCINEMA: From a Greek cunt's eye view
Duration: 3Hours
Date: 23rd April 2016
Venue/context: GREEK DEEP TRASH curated by Cuntermporary
"From a Greek Cunt's-Eye-View" : a performance/video installation in collaboration with Apollvn S Delios.
Building on the work of my MFA performative reasearch/thesis (http://feniak.wix.com/vulvography), I reverse the previous model I have created of "cunt as camera" and turn my cunt into a cinema. As a durational performer, I offer-up my body to the gaze (male, female, indifferent) and use my morphology as a viewing portal to video works reflective of current Greek issues, imagery, situation and outlooks.
HOLDING IN. HOLDING ON, HOLDING OUT (2017)
SEXUALITY & GENDER IN TIMES OF CRISIS (2016)
CUNTCINEMA: From A Greek Cunt's Eye View (2016)
