UFO Visitor #4: Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki (Yellow Brick, Athens) - kopie
I am a visual artist and art educator based in Athens Greece. I studied art at Athens School of Fine Arts, graphic design and interior architecture at Vacalo Art & Design College and completed my Masters in Fine Arts at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy in the Netherlands.
My artistic practice explores the creation of space around objects and the social prospects both space and object generate.
A metaphor I often use for my practise is the ‘table’: a space for performing single actions of making, shifting into a space of coming together and of polyvocal interaction.
What are you currently working on?
Since 2016, my main focus has been the development of Yellow Brick; a project /space I founded in Nea Ionia, a suburb of Athens established by migrants of Asia Minor. Yellow Brick promotes interdisciplinary dialogue and cultural exchange undertaken through relational engagement of writers, curators, and members of the local community. With the board and team of Yellow Brick we focus primarily on multimodal practices including art exhibitions, educational programs for children and adults, artists’ workshops for the production of artworks, art publications, common dinners and experimental activities, aiming at the interaction of research and cultural rethinking.
Parallel to running Yellow Brick, I have been involved in several research and artistic projects with the most recent one being JUNCTIONS21 resulting to an exhibition display and presentation titled ‘Unearthing memories, feeding practises for plural knowledges and beings’ with Elliana Otta, Nuno Cassola and Imaya Caceres at PACT Zollverein (December 2021 – Essen, Germany). JUNCTIONS21 was initiated by PACT Zollverein as an invitation to seven transdisciplinary teams across different continents to develop collective research projects in relation to local and postcolonial contexts. My contribution was a preliminary draft of my on-going research on the practices of midwives from Asia Minor, following the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Stories of migration, human rights, the accuracy of history, language, hospitality, healing, family structures – approached through a feminist lens – continue to inform this research, which is set to have its second iteration in the upcoming group exhibition at Yellow Brink and prospectively form a foundation for a PHD application I am currently occupied with.
How would you define your practice?
If I had to choose a phrase, it would be that of ‘not – yet’ borrowed from Jeanne van Heeswijk’s enticing essay ‘PREPARING FOR THE NOT-YET’
To quote from the text: ‘The creative practitioner has an important role in re-imagining spaces and scenarios for living together. This process does not have a clear roadmap, nor a linear trajectory. The practice is not a series of projects or a series of interventions. It is actually an attitude and it has to become embodied through the practice of the not-yet.’
How do you see your relationship with artists?
Reciprocal, organic and in a constant continuum..I would like to think of each artist hosted at Yellow Brick as an integral component of the ongoing progress and configuration of the project. The team, board and participating artists move within a relational framework aligned to Yellow Brick’s fluid operational mode. Together we are to continuously regenerate those energetic processes of exchange and (un)learning.
What do you expect from the UFO visitors programme?
I am very happy to be invited to the UFO Visitors Programme as I predominately work on collective processes of exchange and research. This has been a conscious choice of learning from and with. I am looking forward to convening with the artists and curators selected, to being introduced to their practice and operational modes and to share my perspectives, finding common grounds of interest and in general immerse myself into new territories of exchange.
BIO
Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki is a visual artist, graphic designer and educator. She holds a degree from the Athens School of Fine Arts and a MA in Fine Arts from Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy. Her artistic practice initiates “mechanisms of curiosity” by attempting to reconstruct new perceptual environments through spatial and performative interventions / notes. (Self)observation, everyday experience, classification as expressions of comparisons, quotations and movements are the ways to evoke meanings and correlations. Plastic gestures, fluid materialities, poetic improvisations and choreographies along with interdisciplinary practices and tools from anthropology, architecture and philosophy are used to create event clusters, trigger energetic processes and actuate polyphonic projects ‑such as Yellow Brick- that expand and complement (her) aesthetic and political perspectives. She has also organised multiple interactive projects in collaboration with cultural and social organisations in Greece and abroad.