Sculptural intervention and lecture
In a time of many endings – species lost to climate change, knowledge lost to colonialism, ways of being lost to capitalism- what could we learn from necromantic practices and the strange space that ghosts inhabit? Endings invite contemplation of what has passed and what the future entails. Attending to endings and inhabiting extinction stories, remind us that there is no singular ending or phenomenon of extinction; rather, extinction is experienced, resisted, measured, enunciated, performed and narrated in a variety of ways. Situating ourselves within the era of small and bigger deaths, might serve as suture or a different kind of temporality, binding the past and the future while becoming again. Ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present that persists in the shadow of mass death, a world haunted with the treat of extinction. In this discussion we will examine the new landscapes that unfold from ghostly entanglements while contemplating on the narratives and practices that must be cultivated in times of multispecies urgencies. Shadowed by the possible extinction of the Akadimia Platonos jungle this talk calls for an assembly that focuses on finding strength through surrender, grief and the attendance of eerie estuaries that disturb the proper separation between life and death. In-between spaces tainted with strangeness and the uncanny nature of nature that abounds in the Anthropocene.
Eirini Vlavianou (b. 1994, Athens) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher. She is a current post-graduate student of Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins, an associate editor of JAWS Journal, a member of the Room to Bloom community and a professor of Avtonomi Akadimia initiative. She has also participated as an artist in various group exhibitions such as REMEDY by Cream Athens (2023), ISMAIL project by TTS, The Telos Society (2022), This is Not a Party at Trinity Buoy Wharf London (2022), Pluriverse II organized by the Biennale of Western Balkans (2022), KI-NIMATA art promenade organized by the Bouboulina museum (2021), Economy of Borders at Tiergarten Berlin (2020) and Back to Athens 7 (2020) and as a lecturer and organizer in symposiums of the public program of Documenta14 and Kyiv Biennial 2017. In 2022, Vlavianou was one of the artists to receive a place in the Scientist in Residence: Making Waves, a collaboration between UAL and the Tokyo Institute of Technology and in 2020, she received the ARTWORKS award by Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Through this program, she was offered the chance to collaborate with SNPHFI and the University of Thessaly in a speculative zine publication as well as undertake seminars by the New Centre for Research and Practice. She currently lives and works in Athens, Greece.
Drawing: Joulia Strauss