Interview by Rich Jevons

8/2/2008, Leeds

What inspired you to do the Greek grandma project?

I was showing a series of videos with my father in a familial and domestic environment – us sitting around the table and talking about politics with my parents coming from a Communist background. It was always the grandma who was waking us up from these conversations and breaking down the narrative of the conversation. She was always asking, ‘Do you want more food?’ She was always the one who was bringing us back to the reality, to the situation of a family dinner.
Also it goes two generations back, so she is always the mother of the mother and it’s the woman who carries the culture with her, the rituals around the table. We made this element of dinner around the dinner table [in the exhibition]: the smell, the taste and the flavour. It was an experience, not to be just sensual, aural or visual.
There were also aspects of cultural identity.
Me being a foreigner in Leeds I formed a double identity, being a Greek in an English culture. This was something I felt I should emphasise in my work – being away from my family, I was trying to bring my family [here] through my work in Leeds. Even literally bringing the grandma in my own space and my new life in Leeds so it showed trans-cultural movement.

Could you tell us a bit about the Dialogues series?

That’s the most obviously political work that I’ve done. It mainly concentrates on my father’s attitude and me as a young girl understanding the conversations. I’ve grown up among conversations with older people talking about ideals like the fact that the whole world is a conspiracy. Nothing is real, the media doesn’t provide information on the real world. I was using technology to record these situations [the Dialogues] so it was kind of a contradiction.

Was your father from a Marxist background?

[My parents] were in different groups: my mum more Lenin and Mao, my dad more Marxist. They are constantly trying to let me know about history which I neglect in a way. A lot of people in my generation forget about it and my parents constantly remind me of that. Now people like my dad are left with nothing because they don’t really believe in anything. Most of them have depression.

What were your main intentions with the Cultural Travel piece?

I think with the Cultural Travelling project with the several communities made me into this trans-cultural woman, a fairly obvious glue between the different cultures. I think it would be wrong to say that I did a community project, I tried to avoid that. I created relationships with these communities which were really strong because they still come to my events and I still go to their houses. I have a new family in a way, that was the intention.
I did it out of curiosity rather than anything else. As a curious foreigner in Leeds seeing all these cultures that never meet each other. I was interested, like with the grandma, to relocate or dislocate the private into the public. The English culture is the dominant culture and these are minorities. I was trying to allow them to show themselves to the public rather than expose them myself.

How about the show at the Design Innovation Centre?

It was more of an experiment because of the location and going from the BA to the MA. It was just a little interim period. I thought because it had this window panel and there were constantly people coming in and out of the offices I was interested to locate myself there and become a living sculpture within the space. So it was a retrospective that allowed interaction with the public. But I don’t think it was that successful. The agencies from the newspapers phoned me and asked me what I was doing for the exhibition and they asked if I could be change clothes to be half naked!

For the PhD project you chose three men who are an influence on your life. What was the notion behind how that started?

Starting first of all with the autobiographical nature of the work and the fact that it’s almost like a visual diary that I am documenting. There is very personal information and intimate conversations and relationships that I’m documenting. I’m more interested in how specific people influence your work and what happens when you turn things upside-down and you use these people within the work. So I was interested how these relationships and partnerships allow creativity within the work. I am trying to find ways of documenting this communication, involving technology or more physical contact. I’m also interested in how you create a narrative, a form of storytelling in a visual way as well.
You mentioned Sophie Calle.
She was blending fact and fiction so you don’t know when the story is real and when it is actually constructed by her. Part of my work is also about the storytelling process where it becomes mythologised. I think the difference between me and Calle is that I put myself at risk by really going through these situations. I think in the previous work nothing of what I really believed was there. I was always hidden behind other people.
This project has already become mythologised because a lot of people interpret it as the dynamic between a female and three males. There’s a lot of misunderstanding which I’m interested to explore.

With the grandma and the DIV show it was artist as object, with this it’s more artist as subject.

The other projects were about the absence of me or my presence through these people. But I was hidden behind them or behind the lens because I was always the director of that. Now I am part of it, I’m trying to pretend that I’m the heroine of this story or this narrative. But at the same time I control it quite a lot. It’s kind of perverse documenting your personal relationships. You become consumed by it, it kind of eats you, the process of documenting your daily routine.

(Photo by: Stuart's Photography)