Nefeli Papadimouli

Textile Sculptures of Social Connections

“Art is a state of encounter.”

– Nicolas Bourriaud

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Nefeli Papadimouli (1988) is a Greek artist born in Athens, and living and working in Paris. She graduated in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Athens (Metsovio) in 2013, and from the École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016, with the congratulations of the jury. She was the recipient of the Artworks Fellowship from Stavros Niarchos Foundation (Greece, 2018) and the Prix Dauphine pour l’Art contemporain (France, 2019). Papadimouli was nominated for the Révélations Emerige in 2022 and was the winner of the Matsutani Prize the same year, supported by the SHOEN endowment fund.

Her works have been presented at M Leuven (2021), FRAC Grand Large (2021), Palais de Beaux-Arts de Paris (2022), pal project (2021), Familistère de Guise (2021), Atopos CVC (2021), Salon de Montrouge (2019), Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (2019), MOMus – Museum Alex Mylona (2018), Festival d’Histoire de l’Art – Château de Fontainebleau (2018), La Panacée (2018), Imaginary homes, 6th Biennale of Contemporary Art, MOMUS Museum, Thessaloniki, (Greece, 2015), CAUTION! SLIPPERY GROUND, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul (Turkey, 2015) among others. In the tradition of avant-garde artists and faithful to her architectural background, Papadimouli explores abstract concepts of relations between various spaces, political and private bodies, and their cross-relations, within a variety of media, including installations, photography, performance and sculpture.

© Nefeli Papadimouli: Idiopolis (| – X), 2024 Textile sculptures, (exhibition view (works on strike) from 17th Lyon Biennale, @ Les Grands Locos. Photo © Jair Lanes

“The social aspect is the backbone of my work.”

My first contact with the work of Nefeli Papadimouli took place last year, at the 17th Biennale of Lyon, in the former industrial complex Les Grands Locos, which became the technical centre of the SNCF (French National Railway Company) during the 20th century. Witness to the history of the French railway, these factories were dedicated until 2019 to the overhaul of electric locomotives and the maintenance of spare parts. This historical reminder of 173 years of industrial labor has been converted into a cultural venue since 2024. I immediately understood that there was a deeper background story behind the costumes that evoked the countless, nameless entities of industrial workers, under the title “Idiopolis”.

Impressed by the gigantic architecture of the factory, history of repair, and those of workers, Nefeli created Idiopolis as an installation composed of two 15 meters long textile walls facing each other. It is a homage to workers whose labor created the history of this industrial complex. The name Idopolis is a reference to her Greek language, combining the words “idiotis” and “polis”, meaning the city and the subject or individual. Each costume is a representation of the individual that becomes a community while interacting mutually, but also inside of a vivid common space of social and political interactions. The installation is displayed in the form that evokes a train carriage, with imprinted “bodies” of the workers.

Borrowing the language from union activists, the “bodies” are on strike- while statically displayed, and in action, during a performance where the amateur participants from Lyon gather to “activate” the project. One of the key components of Nefeli’s work is developing one specific idea through a variety of media. Taking place between performing and plastic arts, Idiopolis is part of a series of artworks under the name Relational cartographies, graphical notations of performances that map the spatial relationships between bodies and environments. Textile pieces that she produces, designs, sews and dyes alone become part of performative choreographies, where she often includes amateurs, each of them incarnating a specific persona through the costume or masque that resonates with them the most, forming in that way a new collective body.

© Nefeli Papadimouli: Relational cartography, 2024, graphical notations of past performances that map the spatial relationships between bodies and environments pencil, color pencil, various papers, 42 x 59.4

Nefeli’s fascination with creating alternative spaces of collective action is inseparable from her personal experience. She experienced first hand the consequences of the economic crisis in Greece that erupted in 2010.

“I was a student during these years and witnessed how the crisis affected the whole society. Our vision of the future changed. Facing precarity, the question was how will we continue to live. We had to learn new ways of organisation, create new spaces of collaboration, and find new ways of living together. My activist practice was born from this necessity. We were all craving for a better, fairer world, thinking that Art could be a very powerful tool in achieving it“, explains Nefeli.

Textile works on a large scale appeared quite late in Nefeli’s artistic opus, during the lockdown of 2020. Previous works include sculptures in classical materials such as wood or ceramics. “The lockdown period was a convenient time for large-scale works with textile. I learned on the internet how to sew patterns, using the old sewing machine of my grandfather, who was a tailor. At first I was using cotton canvases that allowed me to obtain the 3D effect of a sculpture. Though still using the cotton canvas I am starting to work more and more with linen, a material with a low carbon footprint, often made in France.”

Être forêts from 2021 was the first video installation resulting from Nefeli’s textile work on a large scale. The project is part of the Relational cartographies, seeking to create a metaphorical spatial visualization of the complexity and fluidity of embodied interpersonal correlations. “This installation opened doors to a variety of new practices, including video, which I integrated for the first time, to document a performance. I realised that video can bind different spaces together, transcending temporal relations”, explains the artist.

© Nefeli Papadimouli: Photo from the exhibition Milieu Mouvant (11/12/2021-15/02/2022), courtesy of Galerie pal project. Fans made of cotton canvas, oak wood, brass, accompanied with polaroid images 5.4 x 8.6 cm each

The exhibition Milieu Mouvant reflects one of the central preoccupations of the artist- the one of space, in all of its forms and extensions. Her fans made of cotton, canvas, oak, wood and bras question our relationship with shared spaces, and the ways we regulate our distance with others. Redefined by the spectators who adjust the fan between themselves, the space that separates us from others becomes malleable. The accompanying photos are a means of exploring the subject on a different level, in the same way as the use of sketches and drawings.

Passionate by the community, and the forces of a collective, Nefeli Papadimouli creates modulable pieces that engage public participation: “Living together also applies to our relation with space. My interest is to create pieces that bring people together and create connection. The resulting performances are born from my personal activistic sensibility, a wish to act and create collectively, as a community”. The idea of forming new ways of social action and organisation with nature as something inherent to the human is present in the works of French anthropologists Philippe Descola and the sociologist Bruno Latour, whose research also focuses on ways to bring the collective together. Understanding these theories allows the artist to interact with the viewer on a more relatable, engaged level.

Skinscapes form 2021 is a project composed of Papadimouli’s two personal works: Skin-our largest organ, our connective and protective tissue from the outside word, and Scapes-landscapes or scenes. The focus is on the space “in between”, or the space of connection, showing how space influences the movements and actions of the body, and how the body, through its own actions and movements creates space. Skinscapes is the first installation presented in an architecturally imposing space, on the occasion of the Playground Festival at the M Museum in Leuven, Belgium, allowing the artist to create a dynamic, vivid work of architectural dimensions.

“Living together also applies to our relation with space. My interest is to create pieces that bring people together and create connection. The resulting performances are born from my personal activistic sensibility, a wish to act and create collectively, as a community.”

The space “in between” can also be a space of mind, subconscious, like in the project Dream Coat, This space “in between” is the space of dreams, as found in Greek mythology-the myths of Orpheus and the god Hypnos, in which the dream is described as a place, a space where everyone meets. The performance script is context-specific, based on ‘dreamstorming’ sessions with local residents, amateur or professional performers, during which the group shared recurring dreams and reflections on dreams, which are ultimately projections of individual and collective memories.

These performances reflect the core of Nefeli’s interest, which is to connect, to create a community and social bonds. As she says: “The social aspect is the backbone of my work”, and the body is a means of creating this bond. This idea is to be found in the works of Marcel Mauss, who enthrones the body as a sociological object, as a narrow door through which an essential part of the social bond is revealed. Parallels can be drawn with the work of the costume designer Misa Ishibashi and her “collective costume”, the project resulting from the sewing workshop in the Ste-Musse district of Toulon in 2011, led by the choreographer Christophe Haleb. Designed to be worn by several people at once, the costume showed how, while being under the same garment, the individuals need to cooperate and move together, creating in that sense a new collectivity of individual identities.

“It is not interesting to have a perfect result at the end, but to awaken the fragility of a moment, which is also a result of mistakes. It is important to appreciate fragile encounters.”

The performance Dream Coat on the occasion of the 9th Asian Art Biennale in Taiwan was in the words of Nefeli, one of her most incredible, transformative artistic experience so far: “I imagined for the occasion the choreographies as references to folk dances, that can cross the limits of language and become common spaces. Folk dances as very inclusive spaces of encounter are something I would like to study in a more in-depth way.” An important fact in forming a collective performance lies in the fact that performers, regardless, are always selected locally, on the spot, and sharing respective knowledge with the participants is encouraged, in order to open doors for social and subliminal engagement. “It is not interesting to have a perfect result at the end, but to awaken the fragility of a moment, which is also a result of mistakes. It is important to appreciate fragile encounters,” explains Nefeli.

Recalling the process of weaving and the movements of sea waves, the performance Correspondances, part of the ongoing series Relational cartographies, reflects Papadimouli’s relational artistic vision in which an art piece becomes a place of dialogue and confrontation, and therefore of relationship. Although the term relational aesthetics that was created quite late, in 1996, by Nicolas Bourriaud, can be questionable at times, I immediately find the essence of Nefeli’s work in Bourriaud’s famous phrase of art being a state of encounter. Thus, the relational work of art is “no longer a space to travel, but a duration to experience”. It is no longer the production of an object, but the creation of a framework for exchanges, as seen by Bourriaud.

“I wish that my art could enable people to emancipate themselves.”

The LADYBUG sculpture from 2023, made of recycled leather and cotton, from the series THE WORLD IN MY MOUTH, was probably a sculpture that resonated with me the most. as a sociologically very accurate definition of the transformative process of maternity: “LADYBUG is a shell-art piece, conceived after becoming a mother, in May 2023. It can be carried by humans and contains pouches, like a Kangaroo, that carries his baby. The work deals with the questions of motherhood, the ways we discover the world through our child and how we become an animal to protect our baby.”

With an artistic opus so rich in references all-across the spectrum of social and cultural studies, I wanted to know who were the major influences for Papadimouli when it comes to artistic influences. Honoring the place of a collective in her creative process, she defines herself as someone coming from an old and long artistic lineage, from a family of artists. With great fascination she evokes several names, each of them leaving a significant impact on her work: the Brazilian artist, and one of the founders of the neo-concrete movement, Lydia Clark– for movable art pieces that establish a direct connection with the viewer, the English contemporary visual artist Lucy Orta, Ulla von Brandebourg– a German artist probably most known for her gigantic theatre-inspired textile installations, Rebecca Horn– for her “Mechanical Body Fan” sculptures and Trisha Brown– for her performances, among others.

As usual, I wanted to conclude my conversation with Nefeli with something personal, yet universal. On my question about the message of her art Nefeli responded: “I wish that my art could enable people to emancipate themselves.”

Contact details:

Instagram: @nefeliepd

Website: https://www.nefelipapadimouli.com

Sources and references:

Glon Marie: Vêtement collectif, article de revue CAIRN. info, https://shs.cairn.info/revue-reperes-cahier-de-danse-2010-1-page-7?lang=fr

Bourriaud Nicolas: Esthétique relationnelle, les presses du réel, https://www.lespressesdureel.com/ouvrage.php?id=4&menu=0

The Pill; Nefeli Papandimouli, Skinscapes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzNHPcqf92c

Associations Contemporaines. Dans l’oeuvre de Nefeli Papadimouli https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up7DDSxpYzs

Nefeli Papadimouli

Textile Sculptures of Social Connections

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