I am Eleni Danesi, an interdisciplinary artist, architect, and movement practitioner in the process of exploring and rediscovering myself.
Being present to what is happening to us and around is a challenge we accept individually and that's my path as well.
Walking on this path I am focusing on what 's very close to me, what is ME... by body, and shifting slowly my focus further and further away, to YOU, to the other body, to the building far away, to the tree and the tiny bugs on it, to the smell of winter and the hug with a cat, to the other eye looking at me trying to find ways to connect and to my hand searching to feel the sand again.
My eyes are my shoulders when they move but I don't know why
My eyes are my hands when they dance and have their own language, and I still don't know what they are saying
My eyes are my frames when I cut this world into pieces only to reshape it when I didn't like it as it was
My eyes are by breasts, cause they sense more
My eyes are my thoughts cause they are always there, always alert
I am learning to connect, and I will always be learning. My eyes, my journey
MY TOOLS, my stone-age knives: movement improvisation, instant composition, live painting, drawing improvisations with music, camera improvisation, concept photography, conceptual costume, suspension.
Being interested in the ways that each one of us "invents" (even if many things were said before, there is always a part that we invent ourselves) their ways of self & world awareness, I am open to collaborations with the aim to share, explore together, present our "tools" and create a dialogue somewhere in between.
"In the last years, it became clear to me that being an architect or, better, feeling an architect, is not about working in an office, being, most of the time, away from bodily connection with our natural environments or the architecturally designed environments. Being a body architect means that I observe and analyze space from the perspective of the embodied experience, mine or of others. It became very important for my work to share my experience through art and bring questions of perception into public discussion and collective practice.
I am focusing my research interest on the representation of the human body in different cultures, societies, and social groups "in relation to" or "by the cause of" psychological, sociological and experiential forces. Following a methodology of improvisation and my own research patterns, I end up creating mixed media pieces that stand out as individual moments of expression or as part of a more complex narrative, following the labyrinth of quickly produced connection of thought and images.
Following this pattern, I express my work in the form that is coming first in my mind, shifting from embroidery to visual art, to movement improvisation, to voice expression, writing, drawings etc. At the same time, I am proceeding with my ongoing research on bodily intelligence working with personal body practice and experience (I am working on the idea of exchanged pressure between body and matter: for example, ground, concrete, powder, wood, steel etc) and how movement is initiated, with academic and philosophical approaches on the perception of the body in the society (Foucault always stands as one of my main starting points of discourse), or the development of human senses (the architect Palasma, is an example of focusing on the importance of touch in the understanding of architecture and our surroundings in general).
Working side to side with other artists always accelerates the process of realization and awareness, as it is very easy to speak your thoughts and share questions that might be of similar interest or base, try out exercises or go deep into discourses that open new ways of exploration. I am looking for those moments as I don't believe in one and only truth, in one and only view of this world, rather than in unique individual experiences, that can meet each other in short mutual agreements that shape our common grounds. I encourage the blending of arts and artistic expression by using various of them myself but also by supporting and the collaboration of artists, of different disciplines, in improvisational experiments of verbal & non-verbal communication, in an attempt to rediscover the potential of the sensing body."
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EL.
"I understand my work as a clay sculpture that is being constantly reshaped and re-informed by its environments, in order to reflect its own view of the world."