Inside our studio
Inside our studio, I write
Inside our studio, I dance
Inside our studio, I cry, and laugh, and argue with Christos, and have fun with him.
Inside our studio, Christos paints
Inside our studio, Christos shows to me, what he paints, and hides what he paints from the world
Inside our studio, he thinks, and reads, and sketches, and tests ideas.
The studio sometimes is very soft, very fluid, and sometimes very limiting.
We’ve been discussing recently that Putney Heath, this newsletter, is a little window into our studio, but what is the studio, really?
Very soon we will have a very solid, one could even say, a very permanent physical studio space of our own in Athens, a space where we will belong, or will it belong to us? This upcoming prominent occasion as well as our flexible lifestyle of many, many years makes me think of what the studio is and what it’s not.
For me, with my very much writing focused background, a studio is an open, multidisciplinary sketchbook. At some point of my life, it is a literal notebook. At other times, it’s a container that holds my numerous notebooks, papers, publications and writing printed out on A4s.
For Christos… let’s read in his own words then:
a studio is a place for translation. Where ideas are decoded into something else. Where cobwebs are collected and encrypted in different coded languages. In the studio I aim to translate what I think into something that I can perceive in matter.
A studio is the place where I translate all my thoughts into things. It’s a place where I translate feelings into paintings, where I make sense of things in a nonsensical way.
It’s the place that runs in parallel to everything else: always runs in parallel and in different directions from the rest of life. In that place I am in control of things. As if I am the narrator and the conductor of it all.
the studio is a hot mess
the studio drifts away from being pinned down by outsiders
the studio is not a refuge, it is a front
the studio functions in parallel not in sync with the outside
the studio runs apart from everybody else
In other fluid studio news, my dance and body exploration practice has had quite an epic unfolding. I had four very empowering and soul-stirring dance improv sessions, wrote thorough notes after each of them, and suddenly woke up today with a sharp pain in my knee. Which is to say, that I must have dislocated it yesterday, in one of the cathartic floor moves, and that, since we’re leaving for our London trip very soon, the dance practice goes completely on pause.
But, in the words of my teacher, Nikita, movement practice is always about confronting the vulnerability of our bodies (not only the strength and flexibility).
Here is one of the last moments before the pause:
Lastly, in parallel to the studio, there is always teaching and learning for Christos and I as well, but that is its own big story. With others, next to others and in sync with them, we test new ideas (and old ideas too). Like the idea of lost futures, that we are currently exploring. There is a very exciting course we will teach from next week, and below is a screenshot from an essay What is Hauntology? by Mark Fisher, that is one of the key texts for the course.
Very excited for the start of the course, for our new/upcoming studio in Athens, for healing, and hopefully soon!
Xox,
D
