Myrna Marianovits

I am born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece. I studied architecture in the University of Thessaly / State University and obtained my MA in Architectural Engineering in 2017. Since then I have been working both as a studio and a freelance architect. By chosing to study illustration, I intend to inform my architectural practice in terms of visual representation and conceptual schemes, but also incorporate spatial aspects into my work as an illustrator.

Though my practice is transdisciplinary, it focuses mainly on community centered, interactive projects entailing the construction of on site, inclusive research methodologies that challenge the possibilities of self representation in the public realm. My main interests revolve around poetics and poetic expression as mediums for generating intersubjectivity and informing discourse in the process of encountering the other. I have designed and directed literary and creative writing workshops with multiple social groups such as refugees, people facing mental health issues and recently the homeless community in East London -always in the framework of building an environment where individuals would funnel the process and extract from it the tools for expressing aspects of their identities in the public. Apart from participatory projects, in my personal practice I mainly engage with printmaking which is a medium that genuinely expresses me as an individual and art practitioner.

I am led by poetics —any manifestation of creative expression that is unrelated to productivity or profit making — that emerge from an excavation-like process of extracting and preserving traces of personal experiences, mine and of others.

In the unintentional, seemingly unproductive process of poetics, subjects alongside the space and time where they perform their practice, compose a living site, in which traces of their experiences can be excavated and preserved. In this site the archaeologist (the maker and the observer as one) can find the evidence facilitating the possibility of interpreting, and therefore relating to one’s experience. This evidence emerges through a process of isolation and making, in the same way fossils or traces on one’s body reveal the past in the present and extract the lived from the memory.

The moment the poetic outcome is shared, the experience becomes a possibility for relating and thus, a unifying factor between the maker (the talking subject) and the observer (the listener). Such a dialogue can be fed from looking in one’s everyday poetics, in the intimate time and space where the creative practice emerges as a necessity.

My final project Iskopavanje 1/2 synthesises all the theoretical research, reading and on site observations and experiments I’ve been engaging with, for the past two years. This project’s narrative is reflected through a dialogical process of encounter based on poetics as a single medium of self representation and identification of the other.

Apart from the above project, you can find here outcomes of a number of parallel practices I've been engaging with in the past one year.

1/2

2/2

This project started with the production of a series of prints which fell into a wider research, investigating how poetics can be implemented as a medium of encountering beyond the interpretive limits imposed by social identities. In this framework, this process served as a subjective, visual experiment on ways illustration can be incorporated in a process of self-identification, and eventually self-representation in the public realm.

Medium:

Monotype lithography

Size:

30 A4 prints

Exchange Process - Forming the network — All the works appearing in this video were produced in the framework of the project. *Music by George Chronis (participant)

Launch Project

Project website

Curatorial Investigations

The dialogical part of Iskopavanje 1/2 started with the distribution of my works to 30 non-professional creative individuals that reached out after an open call. The call addressed amateur artists engaging with any form of poetics, whose creative practices exist in the realm of the intimate, serving an urge for expression without exposure.

For the first phase, individuals were asked to respond to the chosen work by sending me an outcome of their own creative practice, inspired from it. In the second phase we repeated the same process, but this time working in pairs, producing a second outcome as a response to our partners’ previous work and consequently, opened up a dialogue amongst individuals who were up to this point complete strangers.

In Collaboration with:

Participants names and bios

Communication Expression Identity Multidisciplinary networks Physicality Poetic

1/6

2/6

3/6

4/6

5/6

6/6

For my second series of works, I worked with aquatint, while keeping the same themes extracted from organic, natural elements. By creating more fluid and less linear works, with wider surfaces and a smoother tone gradient, I intended to express the extension of one’s interpretive limits when encompassing the view of others in their understanding. In addition, to represent how the separation of subjectivities is blurred through the process of dialogue, the transition from personal to collective expression, from isolation to communication.

The works are produced as responses to some of the works produced during the project Iskopavanje 1/2.

*1/6 ceramic vase by Giannis Atsonios

*2/6 necklace by Nefeli Tsaliou

*3/6 collage by Apostolia Kosma

*4/6 collage by Liberty Dent

*5/6 poem by Alexia Selanikou

*6/6 photographs by Dimitris Vagionas