Eva Papamargariti
∗1987, Greece
lives and works in Athens and London
Eva Papamargariti uses a variety of media to explore the symbiotic processes and interdependencies that take place between humans, nature and technology. Her practice unfolds in that suspended moment when the grotesque, the fictional and realism all collide, and our environment merges with the virtual, the everyday, the uncanny and the extraordinary. In her augmented reality work Strong, Feeble,Unfixed (2022), she deals with the notions of entropy and ‘becoming’ by means of a hybrid body in a constantly changing state between birth and decay. This uncanny body sometimes appears to resemble a human body, sometimes a plant or a tree, and sometimes a peculiar fossil from an indeterminate era. For The Parliament of Marmots, Papamargariti created a new work that is installed as a three-channel video installation with sound in a garage in the pedestrian zone of Ortisei. The theme she focuses on is the uncanny dialectic of the wilderness, which she approaches by alternating between computer-generated and real-life filmed images. The viewer follows the narrative from a non-human perspective, adopting the point of view of a mythological, chimera-like creature that is slowly drawn into the wilderness by an uncanny urge. Its transformational journey amid fleeing and returning to wild nature is accompanied by ecstatic rituals that lead the creature ever more into a state of bewilderment, ecstasy, wandering and confusion. Who are we in this ‘elsewhere’ that is the wilderness? Eva Papamargariti approaches the concept of ‘getting lost’ as a place that couples longing with a fear of the unknown, posing the question: “How can we learn to let ourselves be ‘haunted’ by the woods?”
Has taken part in:
