Hello,

Thank you for being here tonight.It is a pleasure. (audio sound)

My name is Nefeli  Gioti and I come from Greece.I would like to tell you that this is more like a lecture than to a performance lecture. I am still in an early stage of my research so sorry for bombarding you with theoretical information.

I would kindly ask you to take part in an experiment while this lecture is happening. I would like to ask you to place yourself in space as far as possible from me but in regard that you still are listening and understanding what I am saying. While this talk is taking place you can freely reposition yourself in case you do not hear me.  So you can come closer or more faraway.

I would like to start with a generic problem that I confront. I have understood that I start from an intellectual procedure and then I straggle to transfer it to the body to a movement research. This transformation leads me to 3 questions.

1) How does an intellectual product be transformed into a movement research, into a practice-based research?

2)Why do I need to bring notions into the body?

and this relates with the materialization of the immaterial. Is an intellectual product the materialization of the body experience or is the body the materialization of the intellectual product/procedure?

and that might lead to another question that is how can body materials become an input for intellectual procedures?

3) Are those 2 polarities or there is a circular procedure?

Being raised in an European context where the dualism between body and mind has been established since Enlightenment this questions I feel they are an interesting place to be as an artist since I consciously or unconsciously confront them.

My work I am realizing that has to do on one part with fragments. Literally fragments are parts broken off or detached, or an isolated unfinished or detached part, an odd piece, a bit.  I am interested in fragments of space, time, body and meanings. Dreams are also fragments.

What moves me in the fragments is the exploration of their interrelations, interpretations and representations.   What if we could rearrange fragments through cerebral procedures? And what if fragmenting in a cerebral way creates unforeseen relations?

I would like to share an example from my latest research where I used photographs as a research tool. Photographs are fragments of time and probable of space also. I was trying to extract information that I could use them. Forms, atmosphere, actions, opening up the moment and then create new arrangements in space and in time exploring this way new interpretations and representations.

{So in another way I could say that I am working with the exploration of compositions of things that were not supposed to be together in that way in that frame and observing new relations and moreover challenging things that were supposed to be together by fragmenting them and rearranging them} audio sound

Relations appears to be an important factor of my research. Relations that are being constructed and de-constructed questioning the frame of perception that allows us to make connections.

The materiaity of the body, the representation of the body occurs from our relation with a frame constituted by our personal, social, economic and  aesthetic background.

Our perception of objects creates signs. The burst of a woman is a milk machine, is a symbol of life giving, and a body part as a sign of sexuality, for example. It can be all of them at the same time or none of them.

How it would be if fragmenting things that make sense together (and what sense means?) and re-order them ? What are the new relations that occur? How much of their older meaning as individuals would they keep? How much of a memory?

There is another dimension in my work with fragments that I would like to share.  To have  a fragment presuppose a whole. So fragments can be a vehicle to explore absence.   A fragment can create the curiosity of what has been there or should have been there. So it reflects an absence by its presence. Deaths does the same. It declares an absence by its presence. Photographs have been accused to be agents of death. Roland Barthes says that a photographs is "something that has existed" so in a way it declares also an absence by its presence.

Choreographic environments can be an umbrella of approaching  the creations of settlements out of fragments and observing their relations.

Environment is a very abstract term. It means an assemblage of biotic and abiotic factors and their relations.

So for me it approaches they way I perceive choreography.

Concluding I would like to share that through this procedure of coding and decoding I research on the use of alternates codes and viewpoints to open up additional option for life.