Paraskevi Papagianni 

Visual Artist and Writer 

2026 

The Disintegration Maps 

 “Disintegration Maps” derives its title from the story of William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops”, where his famously inexact digital transcriptions coincided with the September 11th attacks. Through her own “shredding and splintering away” of “magnetised information” and lived material, the artist is interested in the “accidents and contingencies” of telling and testimony in a spectacle saturated environment, and how the simultaneous suspension of loss and disbelief is felt as an infinite loop: ‘history in the making’ through polarities of ambivalent and sublime, virtuous and vicious, grotesque and redemptive, cruel hope and vital impatience. 

If You Dream Of Fish

In colloquial Greek, to call someone a fish is to suggest that they are gullible and easily swayed. However, there is another older Greek divination suggesting that fish symbolise intense desire. In contemporary understandings, the phrase is more of a joke, an ironic appropriation, revealing the total sense of awkwardness that surrounds the possibility of intense feelings of longing or yearning as indications of want, deficiency and sentimentality. This series explores the interplay between innocence, desire, misadventure and transformation as well as the sense of haunting, absurdity and the need to peer beyond limit (and often sanity, reason or coherence).    

  

A Finding Place 

In the artworks included in ‘A Finding Place’, the artist is inspired by a month’s journey starting in Greece, through Spain, France, Austria, Germany and ending in Denmark in the summer of 2024. In the seemingly familiar and stable landscape of European cities the high precarity but also the imaginal charge of thresholds felt immensely present.


In Jeanette Winterson’s book “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal” (which accompanied the artist’s journey) the creative process is referred to as “a finding place”, (an anagram of “finding a place” also).


Observing fragmentation and uncertainty, exist alongside endurance, potentiality and transformational thresholds in a time where “We have no idea what happens next”, the artist collected materials and impressions through various media. In her process of examining high fluidity and belonging, travel acted as a paradoxical container where the rigid exoskeleton of routine and dominion dissipated revealing what is essential and even eternal. 

Placemaking

An examination of place and the elements that invite dwelling and belonging, creating a space that can accommodate the quotidian alongside the absurd, the eerie and the dreamlike. The dreaming mind, nostalgia (what is lost, distant or pertains to a cancelled or yet intangible- future), montage and instances of temporary or less ideal solutions relying on delicate balances and endurance, lead the artist to explore and re-assemble scenes and spaces whilst holding the notion of 'querencia' (a place from which one draws strength) as a central concept. 

This Might *Not* Be The Place


In this series of works, the artist attempts a sideways glance at urban environments and forced mobility: wanderlust, gentrification and appropriation, as well as placemaking and memory. What does it mean to find your place? What does it mean to lose your place? What does it mean to carry on living ‘here’ in the ‘now’? What happens in terms of 'secure base' and 'containment' in conditions where carving out the map is carried out in terms of speculation, extraction and outright violence? 



Water to Fire
  
The works contained in ‘Water to Fire’ (a selection of digital collages created between August 2019 and September 2023) are a political journal chronicling a shift from one personal ‘elemental constitution’ to another, but also one greater social and political climate to another, where questions about extreme neo-liberalism and post-truth are ever-present.

The underlying question in these works is that of resilience in strange times: existential and political questions of personhood and liberty: obeying the elements, or finding your element?

The artist operated between the artistic and the journalistic whilst observing the moment; a form of testimony, or ‘staying awake’, keeping a sense of urgency while cultivating mental and emotional fortitude. Seeking growth, clarity, vindication, as a human citizen.

Marginalia

A ‘manque’ (missed, lacking, failing) is a person who has failed to live up to a specific expectation or ambition. The slang manky, meaning ‘inferior’ or ‘dirty’.
The ‘artiste manque’ is connected to the psychoanalytical concept of neurosis: A leitmotif which we turn against ourselves, a stilted dance with an internalised critic. What often results is a failure neurosis, a profound attraction to failure as the only legitimate expression of true character. 

Direct self-expression and meaning-making are all too easily reduced to collective marginalia. By the same token, many would-be artists whose careers have been aborted are women- traditionally conceptualised as ‘manque’ by the psychoanalytical mainstream. 

These works are all characteristic of this attempt to visualise the above mentioned ‘terrible conflict’; they answer to a need to reframe ‘resistance’ as a creative function, reclaiming the space and conditions for creative self-actualisation.

Empty Questions                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Empty Questions? Is a visual journal of post-youth 'bad poetry' detailing a journey of seeking growth in strange places. The notion of 'empty questions’ is used loosely: a paradoxical device regarding the process of facing up to issues and inevitablities (seemingly) beyond one's capacities and mustering the optimism to do the necessary 'futile' work regardless of success, impact or eloquence. 

Artist Bio and Statement

Paraskevi Papagianni is an artist and writer. She studied Psychology at Panteion University, Art Psychotherapy at Queen Margaret University and Contemporary Art Practice at Leith School of Art. She was born and lives in Athens. She has lived and worked in Edinburgh and Barcelona. Her first solo exhibition Empty Questions? was held in Athens at Ιτς Α Βιλατζ in 2018. Her written work has been published in The Treacle Well, Parentheses and Tastzine. 

Ηer practice is presently focused on analogue and digital collage, and writing. In situating the self in the high present she operates between journaling, archive distortion and memoir in a variety of mediums. Her work deals with the tension between zeitgeist (urban environments, social media and photojournalism) and atemporal (dreamwork, collective unconscious), the push and pull between the consoling and the uncanny as it plays out in the processes around personhood, placemaking, trauma and liberation. Psychogeography and Socially Engaged Practice have been influential frameworks for her more recent practice as means to broaden her ways of working and seeing.