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THE ONLY BAD WORKOUT IS THE ONE YOU DIDN’T DO project, as presented in Octomber 2017 at the Nikos Kessanlis exchibition hall, Athens School of Fine Arts, 2017

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LEG RAISE SUSPENSION

The machine offers you the superior mastery over pain and limitations of your body, in order to blur the limits between disaster and rebuilt, between optimization and trauma.

The position might be painful for you.

You have to keep to keep your body stability, otherwise you might become inverted or slip out of the machine entirely.

2017

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By looking at images coming from a gym's commercials, what draw my attention was the quotes that are used most of the times.

For example, ''no pain no gain'' or ''excuses don't burn calories'', all these phrases are based on the reasoning that we are struggling in the present, for an ideal body in the future. This connection between sacriface and award of the ideal body, brought a lot of questions to me.

By blending images from mass media with already digital processd pictures of bondage, torture, fragmented bodies or exercise, I forge an alternative situation as a way to interact and present another (part-face) of working out. By using the already existed gym's language I set up a seperate reality.

As a manner to incorporate my work to a wider context, I posted some of them to actual gym's or other outdoors places.

2017

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Training causes micro-tears in the muscles that are being trained. The repair of such micro-trauma results in muscular growth. Where is the limit between these micro-tears and total muscular collapse?

Elements of torture-devices, BDSM practices, porn-movies filmed inside a gym and workout exercises are mixed, in order to construct a series of exercise machines.

An exercise machine can be any device that is used for physical exercise. Each machine is designed for a specific muscular area.

Here, the machines function as thoughts on the body and its limits, and not as actual functional devices. Most of the time, the body is placed in an awkward position, so that any struggling could result in more pain to it. The line between disaster and rebuilt, optimisation and trauma becomes vague.

Where is the boundary after which muscular injury makes one grow stronger?

Each one of the machines is accompanied by a manual giving specific instructions. Every one of the manuals was made after already existing exercise manuals. The images and texts are reconstructions, collages with the elements that were mentioned above.

2017

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FRAGMENTS, part 2

The divisions of space are typically arranged in a particular sequence inside a workout studio, in which physical exercise stands out as the central element. Yoga classes, treadmills, weights, workout machines, aerobics can all found in specific rooms in the gym.

As an extension, when you are working out, you also separate muscular areas of your body. Specifically about workout machines, each one is designed for a peculiar muscular area.

Which type of body are they addressed to? Could these muscular masses be detached from each other and function as an individual body?

In this collection of moving images and collages, fragmented bodies or dis-connected parts are using exercise machines. The specific and divided masses are working out as a totality.

Body parts move in a spasmodic way as they become with the machine.

The instrumental vision of the body is brought out as during exercise, the body is seen as an instrument to be used rather than a source of value to be preserved.

2017

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FRAGMENTS, part 1

The divisions of space are typically arranged in a particular sequence inside a workout studio, in which physical exercise stands out as the central element. Yoga classes, treadmills, weights, workout machines, aerobics can all found in specific rooms in the gym.

As an extension, when you are working out, you also separate muscular areas of your body. Specifically about workout machines, each one is designed for a peculiar muscular area.

Which type of body are they addressed to? Could these muscular masses be detached from each other and function as an individual body?

In this collection of moving images and collages, fragmented bodies or dis-connected parts are using exercise machines. The specific and divided masses are working out as a totality.

Body parts move in a spasmodic way as they become with the machine.

The instrumental vision of the body is brought out as during exercise, the body is seen as an instrument to be used rather than a source of value to be preserved.

2017

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Work within the context of ''perform interdependency'' project, a co-operation between Athens School of Fine Arts, Kunshochschule Kassel, and the BA Arts and Media at ZurichUniversity of Arts. Each participant had to develop an art work, individually or collectively. I made a group of manuals, where the most important element was that everyone who wanted to exercise , had to do it together with other people and not individually.

Gym is a place that obliges you to exercise: a world with its own rules, designed to facilitate a relatively constant and exclusive consentration on the performance of the prescribed physical activities. A non-place of apparent socialization, where ready-made identities are being produced.The legitimacy of physical-recreational comes to be found directly on the needs and desires of the person who carries them. So, in other worlds, gym or fitness is presented as an expression of the individual's will. Its like it provides an opportunity for authentic expression of the individual, and above all a way of having fun, relaxing, taking your mind off things, being revitalized.In gym's, trainers ask people to concentrate on their own bodies during exercise and in a way they manipulate the form of the work out or the sequence-the form of the exercises that the individuals are called to follow. Also, the practises of the body are distributed in functionally diffentiated areas within the gym center: they're areas for exercises, differing in relation to the activities that take place in them, there are chancging rooms, saunas and in the bigger centers, swimming pools and other facilities for bady care. Once you pass through the entrance, and the noise of the street is muffled, you find yourself in a seperate and protected environment. Using a variety of different architectual solutions, each gym defines its boundaries in its own way and characterizes its style and atmosphere. How could a gym without any mirrors or equipment be. At this point, most people would probably think or imagine something like going for a run or yoga in the park but that's not what I have in my mind. My perspective is more like creating a new situation by using some of the gym's methodology.

Using GYM'S language, I create a set of instructions in the form of a manual. Instructions that are neutral, cold, paradox, useful and relevant only to a specific exercise. Through these instructions  the bodies aren't used as instruments to achieve a fitness body or to improve the figure, but they are used as parts of a workout machine. All the bodies are building- working out together. In a typical scene of exercise, the gym clients work out together, each focused on his or her own body: the bodies next to them become, to some degree, neutral and innocuous, useful and relevant only to the exercise. But not in this manual. For each exercise, there is a different composition, wherein each time the most important element in that all the participants produce together and not individually.

2017

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As people have the responsibility of their own health, and gym is a place of personal wellbeing, more and more individuals tend to go there. All the bodies move together, as they follow the same instructions. There is an essence of shared experience and practise, but at the same time there is also an element of individuality.

Gym functions as a kind of factory. You have a dress code, machines that help you produce the result you want, and  specific movements to follow from the beginning till the end of the exercise. The main difference is that the product that is yielded is not an object but your own fitness.

In this collection of digitally processed photos the monotony and the process of repetition become evident. Reformed and strongly connected with  each other, bodies produce images in which the collectiveness and automatic process replace the individual way of movement.

Transformed bodies with vague limits are shaped though spasmodic and maniac moves.

The first two pictures come from the presentation in the context of ''DIS/POSSESSION/DIS/LOCATION'' project, as part of the 2016 Rundgang of Kunsthochschule Kassel. The students of the terHeijne klasse moved in an unique choreography within the entire university as well as extended surroundings using shopping carts. Each student exhibited an individual work in the shopping cart and, as a group performancewe  moved through the academy.

2016

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Precisely defined is the course from the beginning till the end.

The horse comes out of the stable, walks, runs, walks and goes back to the stable, till the start of the new race.

Through these pictures the monotony and repeatability of the race horse's life becomes visible. By blending different scenes of the race, which, however, are also the same, it becomes clear that nothing is changing.

Using digital editing, photographs from various hours of the day are placed one on top of the other, thus, producing a single, colorless intensity, with a repetitive result.

2016

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Drawing inspiration from the shape and the disgusting essence that is associated with cockroaches, parallel to the color and context of gold, and the elegant shapes of fancy furniture, I started by creating collages, where cockroaches' body parts were transformed into paradox sofas, tables, chairs or jewels.

As an expansion of these collages, most basic everyday materials, such as cardboard, tape, wrapping paper, were used to forge common furniture. It constitues an alternative manner of constructing furniture pieces, and viewing cockroaches, by transforming common shapes and materials into unexpected forms.

The furniture and home decoration are not seen as something pleasant and static, but rather as useless and a paradox, as it can not be used by human.

This project raises  questions around the decoration of interior spaces, and the relansionship between a specific form and the context that is associated with.

2016

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For this project I made numerous pop-up cards that can be simultaneously opened by pulling a string. Opening them, a microcosm of flamingos unfolds; the movement mimics the way that flamingos move their necks, while searching for food, sleeping, walking, as well as the synchronized way in which they function. I was inspired by the group behavior of flamingos and their distinctiveness, in comparison to other animals. 2014

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Paintings, for which I have use acrylics, color pencils and oil pastel. My main reference is photographs of earth taken from space by the austronaut Paolo Nespoli. I was mostly interested in how something distant and unknown to me, becomes familiar through the painting process. I find intriguing how the pictures look quite abstract, whereas in reality they represent something specific. Fluid forms and shapes are depicted among swells of color and gesture.

The paintings are hanging in my parents' living room, as I had also interior decoration in mind at the time.

2015, acrylics on canvas, 200x150

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 Monotype on plexiglass, 25x35, 2014