ARCAthens Virtual Residency March 2022
Le’Andra LeSeur is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses a range of media including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. LeSeur’s body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. Through the insertion of her body and voice into her work, she provides her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, family, Black grief and joy, the experience of invisibility, and what it means to take up space as a queer Black woman—a rejection of the stereotypes which attempt to push these identities to the margins.
LeSeur has received several notable awards including the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), the Time-Based Medium Prize as well as the Juried Grand Prize at Artprize 10 (2018). LeSeur recently appeared in conversation with Marilyn Minter at the Brooklyn Museum, presented by the Tory Burch Foundation and has lectured at RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI, and SCAD Atlanta, among others. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at The Shed, New York, NY; Marlborough, New York, NY; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Assembly Room, New York, NY; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Anacostia Art Center, Washington, D.C.; SITELAB, Grand Rapids, MI; Arnika Dawkins, Atlanta, GA; and others. Residences include NARS Foundation, Marble House Project, and MASS MoCA. LeSeur is represented by Marlborough Gallery in NY, NY and will have a solo showing at their Chelsea gallery in NYC in April 2022.
Maria Sideri is an artist and researcher. Her practice involves performance, text, voice and sound and her artistic research is influenced from her background in anthropology and history of religion. Maria has performed and exhibited at Kiev Biennale (2021), MOMus Museums (2021), Stavros Niarchos (2019), Phenomena / Φαινόμενα as a commission of State of Concept (2021), the 4th Biennale/ Greece (2013), ArtsAdmin (2014), Trouble Festival (2013) and Spill Festival (2012). Parallel to her solo practice Maria has collaborated as a performer over the last 10 years with various artists internationally: Ron Athey, Manuel Vason, Lina Lapelyte, Dora Garcia, Tino Seghal, Julie Tolentino, Tai Shani. Maria has also been developing community and youth projects like the project Assemblages part of the Artistic Acupuncture Missions and hosted by Lieux Public of the INSITU network in Marseille (2018-9), the project Déviation (2019) with Signal Festival and CIFAS in Bruxelles and Hello World Choir (2017) with Tadamon in Cairo. Maria has received funding from the Arts Council of England for her work Vibrant Matter/La Métachorie project (2014-6) and was awarded the ARTWORKS Fellowship in 2018 in Athens. Since March 2018 she is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Macedonia in the department of Applied and Visual Arts. Maria is also part of an eco-feminist artistic network called Room to Bloom and a member of a music band called Bora-Barx.
“Through different research methods my work is shaped around themes of archives, embodiment, feminisms and rituals. My investigations turn to the body being an archive and archivist simultaneously and towards notions of memorisation and possession as artistic methodologies that uncover histories of bodies that are often silenced. Using different mediums and research methods through the various projects I am engaging with, I am interested in finding ways to expand the notion of archives and documentation through and with the body with an aim to create counter archives of affect and empowerment”.
Maria Sideri
Lydia Matthews is a Brooklyn and Athens-based curator, writer, educator/MFA Co-Director in the Fine Arts program at Parsons School of Design and founding director of the Curatorial Design Research Lab, which spans various colleges across The New School in New York City. A dual citizen of the US and Greece, she trained in contemporary modern art history at University of California, Berkeley and University of London’s Courtauld Institute, and has held academic positions in New York, San Francisco, and at the University of Thessaly in Volos, Greece, where she co-taught as a Fulbright Scholar with Maria Papadimitriou and Giorgos Tzirtzilakis. Her work explores how contemporary artists, artisans and designers foster critical democratic debates and intimate community interactions in the public sphere, often in response to a variety of urgent global and local conditions in their daily lives. Matthews’s essays have appeared in numerous journals, books and exhibition catalogs, and she has lectured internationally on socially-engaged art, craft and design practices.
Curatorial projects include art exhibitions, walking events, community-based urban festivals, and multidisciplinary pedagogical exchanges addressing ecological and social sustainability. Commissioned by Fulbright Foundation, NEON, CEC Artslink, Open Society Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Emre Senan Foundation and the US Embassy in Georgia, she has organized projects within Bienalʼ21 Fotografia Do Porto featuring Alfredo Jaar and Susan Meiselas, (Porto, 2021); Benaki Museum’s Patrick Leigh Fermor House (Kardamyli, 2021); ArtMill Center (Czech Republic, 2018/19); Artisterium International (Tbilisi, 2017, 2014, 2012, 2010, 2008); Batumi Backyards Project (Batumi, 2013, 2012); Dietski Dom Orphanage and Tengri Umai Gallery, (Akkol /Almaty, 2015/16); Proteus Gowanus (Brooklyn, 2014); Souzy Tros Art Canteen (Athens, Greece, 2013); Kuad Gallery (Istanbul, 2012); Benaki Museum Pireos Annex (Athens, 2011); Byzantine Museum (Athens, 2008); and Art Caucasus International (Tbilisi, 2007, 2005).
At Parsons, she regularly teaches graduate/undergraduate seminars on “Walking as a Research Practice” as well as Socially-Engaged Art. Her participatory walking projects have been featured in “Walking Practices/Walking Arts/ Walking Bodies” (2019, Prespes); Ca Foscari University’s Porto Maghera Project (Venice, Italy, 2017), Colorado College’s Design Week (Colorado Springs, 2017), NeMe Arts Centre (Limossol, Cyprus, 2017), as well as in Milena Principle’s “Made of Walking Festival” (2016, Delphi, Greece).
AVR Synopsis – A Cross Cultural Dialogue Between the AVR Fellows
Instagram Visual Conversation
Week 1: Somatic Archive
I can only think about hands as a beginning, middle, and end for sight.
My hands – a gesture for birth. I have felt every part of myself therefore I see myself. Reviving and living through touch.
That touch as gentle as ever continues when we pass, our hands folded, holding us in the wake.
In January of 2021, I performed a piece for a zoom audience titled, “Grief is a burden we carry without consent”.
Grief, like Performance is nuanced. Sometimes I want to be seen and other times I refuse. Being seen is a burden and yet a gift in all the same breath. There is something cathartic about refusal. About the unseen. What occurs when we refuse seeing. When we allow our hands to lead the way?
Stills from a one week body-weather workshop in the Cairngorms mountains of Scotland. Body weather is a comprehensive approach to the training and performance that investigates the intersections of bodies and environments. Bodies are conceived not as fixed and separate entities but as constantly changing like the weather. The term and philosophical basis for body weather was founded by dancer Min Tanaka in the 1980’s and further developed by various practitioners worldwide. This week was facilitated by the dancer and educator Frank Van de Van and assisted by the performers Simone Kenyon and Neil Callaghan. During this
Posted by LeAndra LeSeur
I can only think about hands as a beginning, middle, and end to sight.
Still hands still sway
Still hands still sway
Still hands still sway
In 2018, I created a project very dear to me titled “brown, carmine, and blue.” Within this project, I performed for two weeks lifting close to 300 cinder blocks throughout the space. Holding them. Caring
part of my on-going phd research and of the transdisciplinary artist project entitled “Vibrant Matter”, these photographs are from my current research at the American University of Cairo and specifically from the Women’s Papers at the Rare Books and Special Books Collections.
Looking for the traces of the french avant- garde artist Valentine de Saint Point in Cairo, I have found one letter she wrote to the egyptian feminist Huda Sharaawi from 1939. While my hands searched for many hours different boxes and touched a lot of documents, I noticed the dust left on my fingers. I thought what is an archive without a hand and “I breathed in their dust” (Jules Michelet).
Posted by LeAndra LeSeur
I can only think about hands as a beginning, middle, and end to sight.
“There is no movement without rhythm”, 2021
Here I’m posting a small excerpt from a five-channel video piece focused on rhythm and the way in which rhythm activates our spirit.
My hands held me in this work. They held a spirit hard to define. These hands held rhythm.
The following text was a part of a journal prompt once this piece was completed:
Posted by Maria Sideri
“Valentine”, is a video tribute to the early-20th century artist Valentine de Saint-Point (Lyon, 1875-Cairo, 1953). Saint-Point carried out a series of performance experiments in which the female body is shown not as an object of beauty but as a vehicle of ideas.
Posted by LeAndra LeSeur
I can only think about hands as a beginning, middle, and end to sight.
TW: Self-Harm
In Alice Coltrane’s autobiographical book, Monument Eternal, inspired by what she called an “initiation from the Lord” that grew out of these visions, harpist Alice Coltrane began a period of spiritual testing in the Yogic tradition of austerity, known as “Tapas.” “Tapas” are self-imposed physical and mental tests. Coltrane goes into depth about her process of repetitively harming her physical body in order to achieve transcendence and spiritual awakening. In one tests, she places her hand over a burning stove and watches on as the flame melted the flesh from her hand. These acts have also been likened to a Buddhist philosophy which focuses on meditative acts above physical limitation.
This polaroid was taken by the artist Manuel Vason in 2011 in the UK, in an ancient woodland known as Epping Forrest located between London and Essex. Together with Manuel we explored through a series of improvised acts, the relationship between body and nature and their constant becomings. The trunk I am with became a body and I gripped onto it and onto everything around me,felt alive and connected to the spirits that passed from there and who also touched the tree and breathed with it.
In answer to your question “what takes place when our bodies are put through the utmost struggle and physical starvation?” I would say that we remove the hand from the
I can only think about hands as a beginning, middle, and end to sight.
In your most recent posts, you asked “What gestures hold memories?”
I love this question and the dialogue it sparks.
Memories are linked to so many things but repetitive gestures have been the most rewarding for me in holding and releasing. I find myself leaning into a continuous act asking myself to forget but in the end remembering over and over again.
Once we find which gestures hold memories, does any slight change in that gesture change how we remember?
I am going back to this question of yesterday. “What are the gestures that hold memories?”
Last year we planted with my partner a benjamin tree in Vravrona, a wetland one hour from Athens. We wanted to mark a loss that we have experienced during the pandemic and symbolically offer to nature a new life. As we were not allowed to leave not only the city but our neighborhood due to covid restrictions, we have created these fake forms- in case we would be stopped by the police- claiming to shoot a film in that location.
We have chosen to plant the tree next to the temple of Artemis where the sea and the Erasinos river meet. We placed the tree inside the ground
AVR5 Curatorial Reflection #1 – Somatic Archive
Week 2: Remnants
Rhythm Study 1, 2019
Oil on Linen
53 x 51 in
Rhythm Study 2, 2019
Oil on Linen
54 x 51 in
Rhythm Studies (2019) are a series of paintings that represent a liberation from thought as movement overtakes the artist’s body. Each work is the result of an improvisational performance set to a jazz piece, the canvas transforming into a remnant of internal movement and freedom.
about remnants, remains and residues
Still photographs and an extract video/interview from “Rhizhotomikon”.
“Rhizhotomikon” is part of the collective project “identity in between”. Conceived by the visual artist Efi Spyrou and produced by Runonart, 5 women artists were invited to create performance projects and share their artistic expression and ideas on the notion of identity and its multiple reflections. The performances took place and filmed by the Runonart group at the former airport of Elliniko during October 2020, followed by interviews of the artists.
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“I am less interested in understanding myself. More interested in understanding the other.” – @marsideri
In 2018, I performed over the course of 2 weeks for a project titled, “brown, carmine, and blue.” One of the performances titled “Wholy, Holy” taken after Marvin Gaye’s song of the same name was about leaving a remnant of my body over a duration of time. How present could black be when built up over time? My body was dragged across a bare canvas laid flat on the floor for a total of 4 hours.
The goal was to cover my body in black and rub it
about remnants, remains and residues
In 2014 myself and the artist Manuel Vason devised a performance entitled “I, love to you”. Invited from Άine Philips, head of the sculpture department at the Burren College of Art in Ireland and an artist herself, we have created a performance in the occasion of the Newtown Castle Performance Festival in Ireland. The performance took place in a parking lot in front of the 16th Century Newtown Castle and we have used a rope, two masks and two fire extinguishers that we painted black.
What do we leave behind each time we experience? Can thought or feeling be a remnant? Is it only valued as such when it becomes words that are either written or orated?
“Blue is darkness made visible”
140 Handmade slides
2019
In 2019, I started shooting slide film each time I stepped outside and looked up at the sky. The end result were different images of the sky – some extremely hard to read. My focus wasn’t on clouds or shapes. Just on the vastness of the sky and the ever changing nature of its color. Of its blue.
“Blue is Darkness Made Visible.”
“I feel seen. I feel seen.”
“Am I free?”
“free?”
Read More
about remnants, remains and residues
@ellechien asked “What do we leave behind each time we experience? Can thought or feeling be a remnant? Is it only valued as such when it becomes words that are either written or orated?”
Between November and December 2018 I was in an arts residency in the Villa Empain in Bruxelles. At that time I was researching around the idea of topographical restrictions in regards to gender and I was interested in the ban of women from the Mount of Athos, a monastic community that includes 20 orthodox christian monasteries in the North of Greece. I was trying to find women’s narratives around this topic and I bumped into a book called “one month with the men” (un mois chez les hommes), published in 1931 by the journalist Maryse Choisy, who disguised into a man
In honor of cross shares, I want to honor the work of a dear friend, Gyun Hur (@gyunhurstudio), that has done something quite beautiful in response to the acts of violence against AAPI recently in the US.
“There is a land beyond the river (저 건너편 강 언덕에)”, 2021
Gyun has transformed grief into reflection. Tragedy
Thinking of remnants of resistance and symbolic acts of solidarity in times of war, today I am using this space to post the work of the artist and activist Nastia Teor who is currently in Kiyv. I met them during a workshop in Aytonomi Akadimia in Athens this summer.
Nastia Teor is a (non-binary, s/he) Kyiv-based feminist, visual artist, independent graphic designer and volunteer. Their artistic, design, and activist practices are constantly overlapping. In their artworks s/he uses graphics, text, and video. Nastia is a member of komaxa collective and Room to Bloom and Avtonomi Akadimia community.
Posted by LeAndra LeSeur
I’ve always thought of remnants as a type of physical object left behind. But it’s more than that. It embodies memories, thought, potential. It is the fiber of how we move through life. It is the residue from every interaction with ourselves and others.
Yesterday, I spoke on Gyun’s piece. Thinking about what remnants are left behind beyond violence. Is it possible to transform violence into something beautiful? And if so, is it wrong to think of the aftermath of violence being beautiful?
Posted by Maria Sideri
Responding to @lachienne who shared her thoughts about transformation and violence and closing this week’s visual exchange, I am thinking of what remains from violent departures and I am sharing today a small clip of this song I composed entitled “The Union” that was played as a recording with the lights off at BIOS Athens 2015.
AVR5 Curatorial Reflection #2 – Remnants
Week 3: Ghostly Listening
Posted by LeAndra LeSeur
“Passing time with Grace”, 2020
This was the only work I physically created in 2020. It was a year of extreme grief. For all of us. I had lost so much that year. But felt more so that I had lost myself.
I was faced with forcing love and grace onto myself in order to get back to me.
My great grandmother. A matriarch in her own right. Her name – Grace. She gave to my family so much of herself. She gave us so much grace.
Posted by Maria Sideri
Today I want to refer to a soundpiece entitled “her name”, created last summer and presented at the island of Anafi as part of the exhibition Phenomena. The sound piece was commissioned by State of Concept and the exhibition organized by the Phenomenon Association and the Kerenidis Papa Collection.
“Libérer”, 2019
Speaking of spirit….
Libérer – the french word for release showed up in my dreams one day. I remember writing it in my notebook and imagining a visual – a mosaic – of cracked pieces of a vessel shattered across the floor.
Vibrant Matter/ La Métachorie is inspired from the work of the female French artist of the early 20th century, Valentine de Saint Point. It is a solo piece made as homage for her contributions in the arts that still remain largely unnoticed.
”Art on My Mind: Visual Politics” was one of the first books by bell hooks that I had the pleasure of reading…
hooks speaks so beautifully on the work of Alison Saar, an artist I admire to the depths.
Some words that I feel speak to the spirit as “ever present witness” and the sentiment “the holy spirit as part of our daily life” are what I feel speaks to your question around what spirit we choose to listen to and how…
an excerpt from the album “Voices Of Haiti” recorded in 1953 during ceremonials near Croix Des Missions and Petionville in Haiti by Maya Deren.
Maya Deren notes on the record: « The belief that the proper performance of a sacred formula of symbols or sounds is the means by which man achieves contact with divine powers is a basic principle not only of Voudoun, but of every religion. Such formulae were known as mantras in ancient Sanskrit, and this is still the term for all such ritual action, whether the chants of the Muslim muezzin or the saying of the Catholic rosary. The use of
Posted by LeAndra LeSeur
A small excerpt from my six-channel piece titled “Maybe rainbows do exist at night”
When there is no sun…
A gift from Sun Ra played as this video was captured. I set up a makeshift studio with one blue light shining from above.
The camera was my only viewer.
I extended my neck in the first scene pushing to break open my airwaves and allow something other than myself to be present. What took place was a deep seeing of myself. I stared into the camera in that moment for close to three moments. Unflinching.
Posted by Maria Sideri
@ellechien said :
“The spirit is darkness. It is not seen but it is present”.
Last summer in July, I have participated with an audio paper and a performance lecture at the International Walking Encounters Conference in Prespa in Greece. Using the technique called “method of loci”, originally made in order to memorize the points made in a speech, in this performance lecture I used 3 non imaginary objects that helped me “walk through” the stories of my family’s archives in the region of Prespa. Going somehow against the rule of mnemotechnics, I chose 3 real objects that would help me learn and remember the histories of my family with the help
“Light brushed against her face…fleeting…she exists”, 2019
“Yoruba peoples have one of the highest incidents of twin births in the world. As a result, twins are regarded as extraordinary beings protected by Sango, the deity of thunder. They are believed to be capable of bestowing immense wealth upon their families or misfortune to those who do not honor them. Powerful spirits in life, twins are honored
Posted by Maria Sideri
Today I am writing from Berlin and from the conference and exhibition entitled, “The Whole Life, Archives and Imaginaries” taking place at the Haus de Kulturen der Welt (HKW). The “Whole Life: An Archive Project” is a long term cooperation between different institutions concerned in archiving and the development of various perspectives of collecting, structuring and researching archives.
AVR5 Curatorial Reflection #3 – Ghostly Listening
Week 4: Undo
Speaking of Language…
One part of my practice has been reading poetry by others and from myself and rearranging and combining to re-contextualize meaning.
I do this as practice. As a way to re-imagine words and thought and meaning.
The following passage is from multiple authors – all
Posted by Maria Sideri
This week is about finding actions to loosen, actions that allow undoing, actions of release.
Today I am reading text from the book ” the Nation and its Ruins : Antiquity, Archeology, And National Imagination in Greece” and from the chapter “ From Western to Indigenous Hellenism », written by the archeologist Yannis Xamilakis.
Posted by LeAndra LeSeuri
On Violence…
Some thoughts on the bridge I’ve experienced between violence and language. And the ways I imagine addressing/redressing the violence that feels as if it has been embedded into the very makeup of my body…
Thinking about an excerpt (written here in sections) from Saidiya Hartman’s book “Scenes of Subjection” where she states:
“…redress concerns the articulation of needs and desires and the endeavor to meet them. It is an exercise of agency directed toward the release of the pained body, the reconstitution of violated
Sharing snippets of process and thinking of how to create scores that can be initiated from objects that I carry with me or that I find around me. The combination and usage of these objects and their manipulation or what they represent for me allow for instant compositions and associations that give space for different performances to emerge.
Here is a list of them:
1. A ring that my friend and writer Iman Hamam bought for me in Sayeda Zeinab in Cairo.
2. The book of Iman Mersal “ How to Mend Motherhood and Its Ghosts”, a gift that I have received from another friend and cultural manager Sarah Bahgat in Cairo.
3. My earphones.
4. The crumbs of a cookie from Corsica that I have eaten this morning together with the fellow artist musician Youmna Saba.
5. My driving license (I have it, but I still haven’t properly driven).
6. Flowers from the botanical gardens of the MUCEM that remind me that spring has sprang.
7. My portable speaker.
8. Keys and an artist pass to access art spaces in the museum MUCEM in Marseille where I am currently in residency with the School of Sonic Memory, a project of Theatrum Mundi.
Today I want to highlight the work of an organization, Lead to Life (@lead2life).
While I have their statement listed below, I want to say a few words around my love for the work they are doing. I was moved the first time I met brontë velez (@littlenows) and learned of the work they are doing within this amazing org.
When I think of transformative radical work considering care and ritual, this is the exact framework that gives me hope for what feels like a future that focuses on transforming violence and
This week is about finding actions to loosen, actions that allow undoing, actions of release.
Today I am sharing some stills from an action I have filmed with the visual artist Bryony May in June 2021 at the region of Euvoia, in the thermal springs of Aidipsos, just before the wildfire broke up this summer. These pictures are a preview of the work “Postures of healing” that is not yet published and looks at repeated postures of healing in nature, the shapes and curves of healing while thinking of the mistreating of environmental bodies.
For my final post, I’m posting two works I created for and about my parents.
“I looked up…”, 2021
“My Black Mother Birthed Me into the Blues”, 2019
For the past 4 weeks, I’ve spoken deeply about processing grief and trauma and the ways in which we heal from ongoing violence. This is what my work has continuously spoken to.
But there is something to be said about the things my family, specifically my parents have taught
Posted by Maria Sideri
Thinking of actions to loosen, actions that allow undoing, actions of release, today I wanted to share some ideas on knots and memory. As an act of remembering but also as a support of stimulating one’s memory, knots have been used in various occasions to preserve memory of songs, genealogies, historical traditions and religious laws but also as a way to record dates and numbers. As a memory tool, knots constitute this binding to the past and to our fleeting memories.
AVR5 Curatorial Reflection #4 – Undo