My work and practice as a whole seeks to challenge and subvert the predominant ideologies and ideas that society holds and constructs in relation to identity and selfhood. I am currently exploring this concern and subject matter through a series of video performances collectively named Opening Up. Opening Up entails an exploration and examination of the self within the experience of a contemporary life and the impact that the latter has on the notion and construction of the self. The ‘performances’ are private moments-rituals that attempt to consider the ‘self’ as an entity comprised of elements-physical or not- that reside both in consciousness and the unconscious.

The core of my work is based on personal experiences, observations and analysis. It has become a principal imperative that I explore my sense of existence through the influence and inflection of life that helps me comprehend the interaction of the self with society. Opening Up emphasizes those fragments as ‘moments’ through which self-definition is achieved in specific instances that affect/or occur in the agency and structure relation. Accordingly, each video depicts this understanding of the ‘self’-which is perceived fragmented- and employs the use of the camera as an extension of perception.

The ‘characters’ in this exploration can be seen and ‘formed’ as modes of existing-within-this-relationship responding to R.Barthes’ figures in the Fragments d’un discours amoreux(1977). In the A Lover’s Discourse the word figure is to be understood in its energetic association as it is in Greek where its meaning σχήμα, does not mean schema but in a more vigorous way it describes a “body’s gesture caught in action”. These figures are seen as the individual’s fragments of discourse that “exist only in outbursts of language, which occur at the whim of trivial, of aleatory circumstances”. Respectively, the character seeks to grasp his/her figures as if he/she “struggles in a kind of lunatic sport” and “is caught staffed into a role”, like a statue attempting to approach “what in the straining body can be immobilized”.