Selected Artists
YORGOS PETROU (1981, PAFOS, CYPRUS)
Yorgos Petrou is a Cypriot visual artist whose practice spans sculpture, performance, photography, film, and writing to make artistic interventions into sites of geographical, historical, and mythical significance. Petrou’s politically subtle and layered approach to art-making aims to transform theory, reading and understanding into materials that travel freely between the pieces. His work investigates the relationships between body and land to query hierarchies of value and knowledge. He excavates the materiality of locations for specific cultural and political connotations, engaging with identity formations made via land and body interactions.
Taking an experimental and unconventional approach to a broad range of materials, Petrou uses highly specialized soft silicone to make human tissue-like structures, as well as industrial materials and everyday objects to create photo-sculptural installations. By doing so, he seeks to distort the form, transform surfaces, and explore materiality and its hierarchy in the context of queer bodies in rural environments. He often engages with the liminal space between Asia, Africa, and Europe and their shared colonial histories by looking at stains and remains on peoples and land, focussing on the archaeological – often fragmented – body as it exists within the earth.
Yorgos Petrou was trained in Fine Arts at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and in photography at the Royal College of Art in London. He got grant awards from the Arts Council England (2023, 2022, 2020 i 2019), awards from the Cultural Services, Ministry of Culture, Cyprus (2023, 2020 i 2018) and fro the Royal Docks London (2021).
Since 2011, their projects have been shown in galleries and art centers from around the world such as Greece, UK, Australia, Cyprus, Germany, Brasil and also at the Balearic Islands, Spain.
Yorgos Petrou by Christa Holka
Like Pots and Waves Break (Yara), Yorgos Petrou
ELENA AYA BUNDURAKIS (1988, CRETA-CORFU, GREECE)
Elena Aya Bundurakis is a Greek-Japanese visual artists and photographer, currently living between Crete and Corfu islands. Throw her artistic practice, she explores the weird notion of being a living organism in a natural era that lies between the primal, the modern and the post natural world.
Rather than storytelling, she focuses on researching sensations: how does it feel to have a flesh? How does it feel to pop an egg out of your body? What is the primal form of nurture? She use herself as a specimen of the human experience through photography, draw, video, archival materials, haikus and clay works.
In 2020 Elena co-founded REON, a space for exploring contemporary clay art. This space facilitates an artists residency and community childrens’s workshops, acts as a studio and a retreat program for children who live under the care of protecion associations in Corfu.
Elena Aya Bundurakis was trained Visual Arts at the Photography department in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (Belgium) and Graphic Arts Technology in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Design in the University of West Attica (Greece). She is currently studying Pedagogical Sufficiency Program in the Ionina University in Greece.
She get grant awards from the SUGi x NAVA (2022), Prix Virginia (2020), Prijs Roger DeConynch (2018), Encontros da Imagem (2016) among others. Since 2016, her projects have been shown in art centers, museums and galleries from Germany, Greece, Belgium, Italy, France and Netherlands, etc.
Elena Aya Bundurakis
Hand with Algae, Elena Aya Bundurakis
SILVIA RENDA (1981, MARSALA, SICILY)
Silvia Renda is a visual artist, editorial designer and researcher from Sicily whose practice can be summarized with the words Images – Imageries – Imagination.
She attracted to the contrast between the abstract and the concrete,being attentive to intuitive and trivial images of everyday life which trig emotions. Likewise, she searches for archetypes and mental images to reveal issues connected with the self, identity and belonging. She questions collective imageries that reproduce stereotypes and conceal power dynamics. Imagination is for her a tool of re-signification and re-appropriation, to create other realities, even assuming a naïve position.
Images and design are interdependent in her work as an artist and professional, such as the research, the encounter and dialogue. For these reason her artistic practice explores different forms such as the book, installations, photographic sculptures, objects and unfolds in talks and relational experiences. She also studies contemporary and independent editorial practices, curatorship, mediation and activism.
In 2019, she co-initiated Radial Radiant with Erica Volpini to share interests and concerns and address a transdisciplinary practice. The collective creates books – with a particular focus on books about artistic processes – dynamisations through books and workshops that implement different forms of collaboration.
Silvia Renda was trained in Communication Sciences at the university Alma Mater Studiorum from Bologna, and in photography at the Instituto Europeo di design (Roma) and the Academie St. Joost (Breda).
She has been participating in art residencies in Barcelona, Spporo and Milano. Since 2015, her projects have been shown in art centers from Spain, Italy and Portugal.
Silvia Renda by Emilie Hallard
Ogni dove, Silvia Renda
MARCO LOI (1997, SAMUGHEO, SARDINIA)
Marco Loi is a designer and artist from Sardinia. His practice takes shape from geographical exploration through trans-linguistic and trans-disciplinary research. Marco cross-weaves design, photography, performance and textile, investigating geo-political forces and socio-environmental instabilities inscribed within specific territorial formation.
He is a member of COF – Transfeminist intersectional collective and member of Brigada Transfeminista Sardinia. The associations organises numerous events such as talks, book clubs and protests around civil rights and social actions in rural areas. The involvement in this collectives is relevant to his artistic practice and the discourses around which he investigates.
In 2023, he graduated from the Geo-Design department at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Also he was trained in Graphic Design and Visual Communication in ISIA Urbino and realizing different workshops about the topics of archive, coding, storytelling for virtual reality, etc.
Marco Loi is an emergent artist but he already get grant awards such as Blurring the Lines, ITALIA 90, Artist Premio Mancaspazio, XV Premio Nazionales delle Arte, Residency Lunigiana Land Art and Artist Plat(f)orm 2023 Fotomuseum Winterthur.
He also has been participating in art residencies in Nocefresca and Lunigiana Land Art in Italy. Since 2021, his projects have been shown in exhibition spaces and festivals in different places of Italy, Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Paris.
Marco Loi
Queer, folks, Marco Loi
The residency project (island) has been funded by the European Union and implemented by the Goethe-Institut. The views expressed here do not reflect the official opinion of the European Union.