Eirini

Eirini Vlavianou (b. 1994, Athens) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher. She is a graduate of Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins, an associate editor of JAWS Journal, a member of the Room to Bloom community and a professor of Avtonomi Akadimia initiative. She has also participated as an artist in various group exhibitions such as REMEDY by Cream Athens (2023), ISMAIL project by TTS, The Telos Society (2022), This is Not a Party at Trinity Buoy Wharf London (2022), Pluriverse II organized by the Biennale of Western Balkans (2022), KI-NIMATA art promenade organized by the Bouboulina museum (2021), Economy of Borders at Tiergarten Berlin (2020) and Back to Athens 7 (2020) and as a lecturer and organizer in symposiums of the public program of Documenta14 and Kyiv Biennial 2017. In 2022, Vlavianou was one of the artists to receive a place in the Scientist in Residence: Making Waves, a collaboration between UAL and the Tokyo Institute of Technology and in 2020, she received the ARTWORKS award by Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Through this program, she was offered the chance to collaborate with SNPHFI and the University of Thessaly in a speculative zine publication as well as undertake seminars by the New Centre for Research and Practice. She currently lives and works in Athens, Greece.

My artistic practice is situated in between mythmaking traditions and practice-based research, often informed by scientific explorations of non-human organisms and communities. By employing the principles of exchange and transformation, my practice is a search of the self within an ambiguity in which languages, symbols and practices of the past are reintroduced in order to uncover a more entangled comprehension of the world. Dismantling dominant monologue-oriented narratives that accentuate human exceptionalism, my research is rooted in a myth-telling, oral and embodied, that moves away from the one-hero tale and composts folklore narratives with ecology, science, somatics and poetry. Through my work I aim to reclaim myths from their deracination and establish them as cultural devices that map dialogues between communities and their environment while prizing epic multi-species stories that are revitalized by the ecological balance of decay and regrowth.