Eleni Danesi
BIO /// TRAINING /// COLLABORATIONS
Eleni Danesi is a BODY-SPACE architect, MOVEMENT artist, and researcher on somatic traditional and 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.
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.
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.
PORTFOLIO
Her work....
Eleni works mainly with improvisation as a research methodology for the expression of non-linear narratives. Bodily determined time plays a very significant role in the process of her work and she uses it as a fundamental tool to determine the duration, form, and materiality of her pieces, which are in the spectrum of body installations (somatics), movement improvisation, video art, video performance, embroidery, photography, writing, visual storytelling.
The main drive in these pieces is the need to capture the momentum of thoughts or the momentum of a psychological somatic state in relation to the spaces in which they occur, and translate them into a sensorial concept of an embodied experience. In this sense, her projects are produced as documentations of self-exploration and case studies on the representation of (e)motions- of energies in motions- in time and space, from which she uses the collected data to elaborate concepts for workshops of somatic architecture and interactive embodied interkinetic experiences.
Since 2017, she is active in the fields of somatic practice, the evolution of the movement, architectural embodiment, the neuroscience of movement, the science of perception, and she has been questioning and experimenting with ways of delivering those discoveries through her artistic work. So far, she has designed different workshops focusing on movement-body and body-space awareness, weaving the connections between our thought-imaginations-bodies-communication and relationships.
The exploration of the sense of TOUCH in the last years has played a significant role in the trajectory of her work, as she "sees" everything through the "EYES OF HER SKIN", which reflects the work and writings of J. Pallasmaa on the relation of the skin with the surrounding spaces and the architectures we inhabit, and the importance of the sense of touch in the formation of our world-image and perception.
She is interested to collaborate with artists on projects related to movement-space exploration with various media, especially new technologies which would bring her body into new phases of bodily explorations.
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 2014 she founded LatoMeio Project, which 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 LatoMeio LAB, which is an under-construction project-incubation-space.
In 2015 she became 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.
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:
/// 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,
ARS ELECTRONICA, LINZ
Austria