BIO /// TRAINING /// COLLABORATIONS
Eleni Danesi is a BODY-SPACE architect, MOVEMENT artist, and researcher on somatic contemporary embodied practices.
She specializes in movement improvisation as a method for achieving somatic and spatial awareness and building bodily and spatial perception.
She focuses her research on the philosophy of movement and bodily obtained knowledge for a personalized understanding of our inner spaces in dialogue with outer architectures, seeing the skin as a reference to the transition from one space to the other, if not seen as one.
Navigating through a variety of fields that explore human perception and spatial behaviors, she creates concepts for embodied spatial exploration practices, with the aim to contribute to the movement of embodied design, the enactive approach to architecture, and the practice of movement as a thinking creative process.
Her multidisciplinary research is manifested through a variety of expressive media (movement, action painting, embroidery, sculpting, visual media, writing), exploring the interconnections between the various practices filtered through the same body.
She lives between Leonidio (GR), Berlin (DE), and Linz (AT) where she is currently working at Ars Electronica Festival, as a speaker and program manager for the Founding Lab of the Institution of Digital Sciences in Upper Austria, a new Institution on interdisciplinary Studies of Digital Sciences, New Technologies, and Mixed Media Arts.
She studied Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and continued her postgraduate studies in Architectural Design "Symbiosis" at the University of Thessaly. She participated in the annual workshop of the SOMATIC ARCHITECTURE LABORATORY, at the Universidad CEU San Pablo, in Madrid, organized by Maria Auxiliadora Galvez. She is currently a practitioner of Creative Leadership Coaching.
By practicing "touch", we practice connecting and relating, therefore we practice coexisting. We create systems that we can affect with our touch, with our touching presence in a profound and political way.
TOUCHing is a political act, for me, in ways that it reveals intention towards the OTHER, any other: a person, an animal, a plant, a rock.
Her work....
I work with improvisation as a way of researching and expressing stories that do not unfold in a straight line. The time it takes my body to move, respond, hesitate, or make something often determines the duration, form, and materials of a piece. My work moves between body installations, movement improvisation, video performance, embroidery, photography, writing, and visual storytelling.
I often begin with a moment I want to understand: a thought taking shape, or a psychological and bodily state emerging in relation to a particular space. I follow it through movement and making, then look for ways to translate that experience into something others can sense. The resulting works are both records of self-exploration and studies of how emotion—energy in motion—might be expressed across time and space.
What I observe through these processes also feeds into my workshops in somatic architecture and my experiments with interactive, embodied experiences.
Since 2017, I have been exploring movement, architectural embodiment, and perception through artistic practice. I am interested in what we can discover through the body, and in how those discoveries can be shared. In my workshops, I bring attention to movement and spatial awareness, weaving connections between thought, imagination, the body, communication, and relationships.
Touch has become particularly important in my work. I sometimes feel that I see a space through the eyes of my skin: through texture, pressure, temperature, proximity, and contact. Juhani Pallasmaa’s writing has helped me articulate this relationship between the skin, the spaces we inhabit, and the ways we form an image of the world.
I am interested in collaborating with artists who explore movement and space through different media, including new technologies. I want to see what unfamiliar tools and environments might allow my body to perceive, question, and do."
In times of political corruption and violation of human rights, I find "reflecting on how we touch", and even "re-learning touching", to be necessary in order to imagine the shape of contemporary democratic, social, political, interpersonal, and intrapersonal structures.
parallel projects:
In 2017 she founded LatoMeio Project, which is her collaboration space. A space where her interaction with other artists is the artistic outcome. It's a time-space for artists who gather their interests, passions, and skills to create projects of interdisciplinary approaches. LatoMeio Project has organized 2 Residencies for artists called "The Martian Chronicles Residency", dealing with the topics of "collective art", "interconnectivity", "body-space", "the architecture of bodies", ärchitecture and body memory", and more. Branches of LatoMeio Project are LatoMeio Aerials, specializing in the art and physics of aerial movement, and Multiscapes LAB, which is an under-construction project-incubation-space researching the intersection between Architecture and the Neuroscience of neuroaffective spaces.
She is one of the founding members of "Panjika Cooperative", a non-profit cooperative of various fields of interest, such as sports climbing, culture, and arts, music concerts, artistic projects, environmental sustainability, etc, where she works seasonally as a creative director, exhibition curator, graphic and web designer, supporting a living and growing rural community of active and beautifully creative people in her hometown, Leonidio, Greece.
Since 2023, she has been a collaboration partner at mkrz lab: alternative lab for future skills in Austria and a member of the mkrz association, where she developed design methodologies for creative innovation. She worked for ARS ELECTRONICA festival, for the FOUNDING LAB project: the beginning of a new Arts and Science University in Linz. Since then She has collaborated with Ars Electronica designing match-making workshops for cross innovation collaborations between Artists, Scientists and Engineers.
In 2024, she joined the dance association Redsapata in Austria as an international artistic jury, contributing to the selection of performing artists and dance productions to be presented in the city of Linz, (AT).
Past Collaborations with:
FLOATING UNIVERSITY, bERLIN Germany
KINDL, bERLIN
Germany
URBANRAUM, bERLIN
Germany
LAKE STUDIOS, bERLIN Germany
HELERAU, dRESDEN
Germany
WISP KOLLEKTIV, lEIPZIG
Germany
GARBICZ FESTIVAL, gARBICZ
Poland
AERIAL ARTS FESTIVAL, vIENNA
Austria
XOROXRONOS DANCE SCHOOL, aTHENS
Greece
Eleni practiced with:
/// Hwanhee Hwang- In C repertoire, 2weeks intensive workshop, A!KO Tanz Festival , Linz
/// Karen Palmer- Storytelling from the Future, Founding Lab Summer School, Ars Electronica, IDSA, Linz
/// Maria Auxiliadora Gálvez- Laboratory of Somaric Architecture & Landscape, LSAAP.
/// Jenny Haack- Soundlab, movement and sound improvisation
/// Keith Hennessy- performance techniques, movement improvisation, political voice
/// Luke Murphy- vigilante-movement research
/// Antonis Anisegos-music improvisation
/// Alexandros Psychoulis-artistic practice
/// Judith Sanchez Ruiz-Your own God/movement improvisation
/// Rootles Root-fighting monkey
/// Tom Weksler- flow acrobatics
/// Un Loup pour l' homme-rolling dogs (acrobatics)
/// Emiliano Ron-aerial rope,
BAYERN INNOVATIVE, bAYERN
Germany
ARS ELECTRONICA, lINZ
Austria
MKRZ LAB, lINZ
Austria
REDSAPATA, lINZ
Austria
ARTMAGAZINE, lINZ
Austria