Eirini Vlavianou

Eirini Vlavianou is a visual artist and researcher born in Athens, Greece in 1994. She holds a BA in Visual Arts from Deree, The American College of Greece, a former student of the Audiovisual Design program of Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and a current research fellow at the New Centre for Research and Practice institute. In her work, Vlavianou is intrigued by the mysticism entangled in traditional practices, fabricating topographies of the unknown, the enigmatic and the sacred. Those recreated “topoi”, as fields of memory and historical recordings, functioned as inspiration to map the content and fluidity of the feminine experience and the ritualistic practices that were interweaved with it, while retracing the sensory and emotional elements that shape a “topos”. She became interested in those spaces that reside within the mundane; the in-between spaces of life within which scattered histories unfold. The world of trauma, either personal, political or social, became also a core element of her work. She is captivated by the debris of time, all those traces that are left behind as scars, wounds or echoes of memories and seem to exist in a fluid, alternate continuum. Balancing between divergent mediums, Vlavianou tends to have an investigative viewpoint towards the spaces she is called to discover. Using maps (morphological, conceptual or actual), field notes, or sound recordings as her materials she asks for those spaces to re-emerge through their relics. For her, it is the relics that construct our own reality and it is through those we understand our very existence. Vlavianou is an active professor of Avtonomi Akadimia initiative and one of the fellow artists that received the ARTWORKS scholarship of Stavros Niarchos Foundation in 2020. Her work has been presented in various exhibitions held in public spaces, galleries and festivals such as Tiergarten Berlin, Akadimia Platonos, Space 52, BESTival 2017 and Back to Athens 7 by CHEAPART. She has also participated in symposia in the public program of Documenta 14 and Kyiv Biennial 2017 and has contributed as an editor in many publications, including the “Extra-Terrestrial Ethnographies of the Future-Present” fanzine, organized by SNFPHI at Columbia University, University of Thessaly and Athens Zine Biblioteque, Krytyka Polityczna magazine and Τhe ΤΕΛΟΣ Society press. She currently divides her time between Athens and Tinos.