TRANSFER IS PLEASED TO PRESENT ‘PRECARIOUS INHABITANTS’ a new time-based media installation from Greek artist Eva Papamargariti. ‘Precarious Inhabitants’ is a series of works addressing issues of symbiosis and transformation between human, AI machines, animals and other organic and synthetic bodies. For her first solo exhibition with TRANSFER, Papamargariti creates a large-format adaptation of her single-channel moving image work ‘Always a Body, Always A Thing’ first commissioned and exhibited in Greece by curator Nadja Argyropoulou.

From the “Paratoxic Paradoxes” exhibition, recently curated by Nadja Argyropoulou and organised by the Benaki Museum and PCAI in Greece:

“…more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; […] it is ubiquity made visible. […] it is ubiquity made visible. […] less a thing than the trace of a movement. […] The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.” — Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957 —

As one of a generation that approaches in new terms the relations of soft/hard and surface/depth, introduced by semantics and sociology in the previous century, partly upon the advent of plastic (its derivation from oil, its uses and its metaphysical interpretation), Papamargariti starts from the emblematic texts of Roland Barthes about the “magic substance” with its “alchemic properties.”

Her research centers on the concept of the amorphous as a way of resisting formulation and identification and the way in which plastic comes from nature and returns to it as non-biodegradable waste, having absorbed like a vampire elements of life and time in the course of its transformations and wanderings, in a process of biophagy and tempophagy.

In her new work Papamargariti also examines transformation and morphological/ontological fluidity through a series of bizarre incidents – actual or imagined – whose common thread is the ingestion and embodiment of plastic by living beings (fish, frogs) that end up mutating, as well as the appearance of a host of amorphous masses in natural settings (meadows, lakes).

Using moving-image tools (digital animation, 3D simulations, computer-generated soundscapes), which reflect this material and translate it in 21st‑century terms, as well as objects–sculptures which convey materiality from a digital to a real environment, the artist introduces us to toxic progenies of the living world and to the queer futures they portend.”

Text by Nadja Argyropoulou, March 2017

ABOUT THE ARTIST///

EVA PAPAMARGARITI grew up in Greece where she graduated from the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly with a Diploma in Architecture (2012). She holds a Master Degree on Visual Communication Design from Royal College of Art, London. Her practice focuses on time-based media (video, gif animations) but also printed material and sculptural installations that explore the relationship between digital space and (im)material reality.

She is interested in the creation of 2d/3d rendered spaces and scenarios which provoke narrations based on the obscure simultaneous situations happening in a quotidian frequency on the verge of digital and physical environments blurring the boundaries between these ‘ecosystems’. Her work delves into issues and themes related to simultaneity, the merging and dissolving of our surroundings with the virtual in addition to the constant diffusion of fabricated synthetic images that define and fragment our identity and everyday experience. Furthermore, processes that are established through online presence, as well as the traces that our operations inscribe to the objects and habitat where we find ourselves situated into, through our continuous interaction with devices and machinic artifacts.

The last years she has collaborated with different design groups and brands like NIKE, Kenzo, MTV, Diesel and she has exhibited her work in cities like, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Berlin, Seattle, Amsterdam, Lima, Toronto, Montreal, Athens, Edinburgh among others; more specifically in institutions museums and festivals such as the New Museum (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Tate Britain (London), Museum of Moving Image (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal and Transmediale Festival, Berlin and also on the Internet ( Panther Modern, Parallelograms, ANIGIF, 15Folds, Channel Normal, The Wrong – Digital Art Biennale, Eternal Internet Brotherhood, Cloaque.org)