Slow Life Revolution – Gesture#2
Bio
Maria Andreou was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1989 where she currently lives and works. Andreou’s work is a research-oriented, multidisciplinary practice that evolves with the use of drawing, sculpture and language. The research is dealing with themes such as the processes of subjectification, the instrumentalisation of language in geopolitical agendas, deep time versus human time as well as ancient writing and landscape as geopoetics. She has been an artist in residence with foundations and organisations in Cyprus such as ‘’ARTos Cultural and Research Foundation’’, ‘’Centre of Performing Arts MITOS’’, ’’Phytoreio – Cyprus Visual Artists’’, ’’Loukia & Michael Zampelas Art Museum’’, ‘’Mitos, Centre of Performing Arts’’ and ‘’Snehta’’ in Athens. Other shows include ‘’Wads’’ for ‘’Ars Electronica’’ (Austria), ‘’Not to Sing Like a City Bird Sings’’ Pori Biennale 2020 (Finland), ’’Phase 1” at ‘‘DriveDrive’’ (Cyprus), ‘‘Ecstatic Textures’’ at ‘‘Garage’’ (Cyprus), ’’Urban Emptiness’’ in NeMe Arts Centre (Cyprus) and ‘’Milan Stepanovich’’ in Miroslav Kraljević Gallery (Croatia).
Artist Statement
My work is strongly based on research that is concerned with language and its processes of subjectification whilst investigating a position that places it between geopolitics and geopoetics. Grounding then through works often in the form of sculptures and drawings, I am particularly interested in the instrumentalisation of language in geopolitical agendas as seen through a historiography of ancient writing in Cyprus. As writing is thought to be the beginning of recording human history by working with natural and foraged materials I aim at blurring the distinction that forgets deep and geological time and remembers the invention of writing as a mnemotechnic device or otherwise a tool to remember time. The work that results is informed by the collective sociopolitical and historical connotations attached both to language and materiality as well as exploring their very own commodification.
Description
Slow Life Revolution is an archive of gestures that explore notions of time via labour and making against the fetishisation of productivity. Via this I hope to venture into: re-claiming the agency of time that comes with craft, blur the division between institutional practice and amateur technique as well as understand productive versus re-productive labour in contemporary life. I’m also interested in poking at the fascination and the necessity of the end-object as a canvas for aesthetic projections and whether these processes can include contingent actions, works and words.
Gesture #2 (a list of titles as the project description)
‘’Spontaneous Geopoetics’’ or ‘’Slow Tools’’ or ‘’Ephemeral Outdoor Studio’’ or ‘’On Location Creation’’ or ‘’While I’m Here How Can I Make The Most Of It Without Making Anything?’’ or ‘’Searching for Wild Clay’’ or ‘’Remembering and Forgetting at the Same Time’’
