Γητειές (Healing incantations)
Presented at the international conference Learning with Mountains: Recalibrating how we understand art and the planet
Celadon Centre for Arts & Ecology
Nicosia
6-8/2/2025
Press
https://learningwithmountainsconference.wordpress.com/about/
https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38666/4/learning-with-mountains-booklet-updated-7-feb.pdf
Abstract
The rich history of Cypriot sericulture threads through craft, commerce, exploitation, colonisation, and domestic and industrial production but has repeatedly excluded the posthumanist perspective of the silkworm, whose lifecycle is violently interrupted in the process.
This perspective, depicted in large oil paintings on deadstock raw silk, formed the basis of a solo exhibition at Koraϊ in Nicosia in 2023, titled An Elegy for Coming Undone, curated by Denise Araouzou.
In my practice, deadstock raw silk turns into a distorted symbol; an emblem that refigures itself. Over time, my interaction with the material has laid the foundations for an interspecies dialogue that actively negotiates with the material’s symbolic connotations and expands the notions of biopolitics and power. Beyond biochemical and industrial processes, this dialogue also considers socio- ecological interdependencies and crises, literal and metaphorical fertility/infertility, and the struggle for metamorphosis on an increasingly toxic planet.
I draw inspiration from marginalised and persecuted women's collectives across time and place, who conjure spells that tend to the community, the land, and the waters, making and protecting spaces for solace and regeneration.
Reflecting on remnants of such ritualistic practices from the archaic period in Cyprus, Cypriot healing incantations and the journey of the silkworm, this presentation will weave spiritual, ethnographic, and socio-political threads through the personal.
