Art & Society Course | Fall 2021 | Individual Academic Project | Instructors: L. Nonken, I. Lupi
Created during my time at the Siena Art Institute as part of the “Art & Society” course, Untitled, 2019 was a participatory performance centered on the concept of time. The aim was to contruct a situation where intangible notions are being quintified through various media and symbolic gestures.
instructions
A long rope acted as a physical metaphor for each participant’s time. As they held on to different segments, I guided their movement through a specific path, periodically cutting the rope with oversized scissors—abruptly “ending” time for some. As the performance progressed, I dragged multiple ropes simultaneously, embodying a “time executioner” who both leads and burdens.
ingredients: clock, time
All instructions were delivered in Greek (an unfamiliar language to the international audience) mirroring my own experience of linguistic dislocation while living abroad. Phrases like “The rope is your time,” “Don’t waste your time,” and “The animal that threatens us now is called time” (a reference to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth) constructed an absurd, yet loaded, narrative framework.
The performance concluded outside my temporary residence. There, I presented a black trash bag and asked participants to “surrender their time” (the cut rope fragments) only to inform them that they had “failed” and “wasted their time” before walking away with their surrendered remnants. Later, these rope pieces were transformed into two gypsum-dipped standing sculptures, freezing the ephemeral experience into material form. The work negotiates themes of temporality, control, communication barriers, and the human urge to quantify the unquantifiable.