SOFT FORTRESS
Athens, Greece
August - September 2025
Fish Factory Arts, Penryn, UK
October 2025
I cringe therefore I am.
During my residency at Fish Factory Arts Space, disparate experimentations in photography, drawing and video came together to create a mixed-media meditation on the following questions:
Does our own, embodied experience of ourselves correspond to how we are perceived by others? How do established, semiotic regimes define, or even reduce our identities? How can one remain emotionally soft and open while still protecting the essential, inaccessible core that is the essence of our personal experience? What does it mean to be different while also firmly entangled beyond one’s control with strangers and loved ones?
The reliability of images, whether photographic, hand-drawn or projected is put into question. Oftentimes, in order to understand something critically, we need to first create distance and then achieve a closeness, an embodiment of understanding. Similarly, in order to understand and fully embody ourselves, we need to first create distance from ourselves. As with previous projects, I adopted a process-based, mixed-media approach, showcasing material processes and surface tension as valuable means of exploring the ontology of images as tactile objects that extend human agency, or as the anthropologist Alfred Gell maintained, to ‘distribute personhood’.
Photographs from my extensive archive are defaced, transformed and graffiti-ed on with bleach, documented memories rendered soft and malleable. The drawings also use bleach on handmade, indigo-dyed paper, creating splodgy, ambiguous compositions that though abstract, also make use of figurative elements of faces, hearts, splayed limbs, elements that are recognizable but also unclear as to their symbolism. This process touches on how we are inevitably marked by how we are perceived, as much as we don’t want to. For example, the photographic self-portrait defaced with the word ‘COCKSUCKER’, is about internalised homophobia and how it has marked me. The video-collage ‘Softness’ overlaps and fragments images of the mundane and acts as an experiment on how the above themes can be translated into moving image.
Objects and memories are marked over time, and an agreed upon facsimile has to be accepted. Again, what is agreed upon does not always correspond to what is felt as true.
The philosopher René Descartes insisted on the division of body and soul as two fundamentally intrinsic substances, the corporeal eventually disposable and a mere vessel to the indivisible mind. Perhaps instead, the soul is entrenched within the functions of the body, though fragmentations and inner conflict can exist.
I think therefore I am? More like, I cringe therefore I am.
