Undermine (2019)

During two weeks of artist collaboration at The Skopelos Foundation for the Arts, Romina Belda and Nasia Papavasiliou created a series of recorded spatial interventions presented in the form of video installations both indoors and outdoors. The work portrays poetic metaphors through still performances in the form of site-non site specific practice. The natural beauty of the island of Skopelos, located in the Aegean sea, ironically contrasted with other environmental realities which currently suffer from land degradation and lack of ecological resilience. This paradox became an unfolded dialogue between human ignorance and awareness towards climate. Time and topography kept reflecting the local landscape within the global crisis revealing that nothing is more local than ecology. The research process was orientated to the question of how our artwork could express a direct contact with the landscape by resorting to the notion of Anthropocene. We found places and utilized them as a magnifying glass from the island microcosm, framing unexpectedly a work which coexists with the place it creates. The choice of using non-defined sites manifested our interest in the ignored (unobserved) and the urge for the spaces to come to life by placing a human body as a primal immersion. Both intention and action – still and ongoing – are implied poetically through metaphors to the way we as humans act and interact in the landscapes we abandon or take use of. The work that is presented in video installation formats, combine interventionist art, performance and extended photography. Our work, takes ecology as a starting point to suggest its dependence on a set of interrelated social and political systems allowing the work to be addressed in a broader context.