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All the images, text or other items that constitute this page are pieces found or created within the frame of my current artistic research. Having as entry point the idea of love as a form of affective solidarity, this research takes place outdoors in the form of long walks.

Eleftheria Sokratous
Artistic Blog

Relovution: Imagining Love as a navigation tool for the creation of Desire Lines and possible ANDings

Found Lines during my walk through Musis Park in Anrhem (NL)
11/10/2023

Created on the 10/10/2023

12/10/2023: Defining my practice

My practice evolves around the act of taking a walk, as a phenomenological way to notice who/what moves me, in which direction and why. In addition, this is a practice of observing the traces of my movement and the lines they create along the way. It is not only about creating lines but noticing and acknowledging the lines to be found along my path. I then try to speculate by what or whom they were made of, how they happened, and if they happened accidentally or intentionally. The lines I am creating are in a dialogue with the existing lines of my surroundings. In that sense, I suggest a form of intra-action between myself and the landscape.

Aim: Raising awareness on the biomechanics of bipedal locomotion (walking). Awareness in how the body is used and awareness of the position of the walker coming from a western, able-bodied, shoe-user background.
Feedback from my peers:
-They realize all these things that their body does just by taking few steps.
-Sensing more openness
-This very scientific way of walking is interesting in relation to the limitations and the ignorance of conventional scientific research in terms of including cultural differences and dis/abilities. Art could be in this example a way of highlighting this gap.
- What would happen if we would listen to a similar audio about how does a person with crutches move or a wheel chair user?

13/10/2023: Sharing one of my routines in Practicing walking & Falling with two of my peers through this audio file.

Research Inspirations

This hier is the collective map we made on the spot after the walk that involved words and drawings that had been collected.
While the map was constructed in real time, the images as well as the sound that the participants have sent to the chat, had been displayed in the studio with the idea of creating an extra visual and audio landscape.

15/10/2023 Walking score: Use your walking pace as a sound base on which you add sounds based on affect.
Aim: Listening to the landscape and use it as a tool for navigation and creative cartography.

Follow the sounds that create an affect on your body navigating near or far from them according to the sensation they give you. After 15 mins take the same route back revisiting the sounds and each spot until you reach your starting point.
Feedback:
-The time amount should be the same while going and coming.
- The idea of non-linearity is not as present as in previous experiments.
-For some people, the walking pace as a sound base was not a clear instruction.
-Others were focusing more on keeping the walking pace rhythm therefore it did not help them give more attention and time to stop and listen to other sounds.

13/02 Walking score: Walk non- stop as slow as you can for an hour in a room observing what you encounter as well as what you leave behind.
Experience: I set an alarm and started walking in the studio. At the beginning, the time was going very slowly. Felipe was there practicing his piano and this gave me strength to stay focused on my thing as well. As time moved on I found that this space that was supposed to be empty and neutral is full of lines, scars, holes, shadows, and many other hard-to-notice elements.
Bodily observations: In the end, I felt pain in my shoulders and my upper back area. I think the fact that I was moving slowly did not allow the rotation of the upper body that usually happens in a walk therefore my body was not accustomed to this movement. Maybe the fact that I was moving forward but my awareness was in what was left behind it has affected my posture as well.

05/02 - 09/02/2024: Experiments within the period of the Module Tidal Bodies
I was waking up every day to go for a walk in Wadenzee alone. Our tutors were encouraging us to use the psychogeographical notion of dervive (driftin away) to encounter the landscape and then use a rhizomatic- (non-linear way and unorganized way from a logical perspective) as well as a less anthropocentric way of writing (approaching nature without anthropomorphizing it or imposing ideas on it).

Most important discoveries for my research:
-The notion of thin places which in Celtic Culture are places that are left behind.
-The notion of derive from Guy Debord and other situationists
- I remembered that I am interested in the not knowing, the discovery of the route, the getting lost that comes through the encounter with the landscape.
-Question/Problem that came up: How to facilitate this not knowing in my score while being inclusive to the participants?

12/02/2024- 16/02/2024 - Experiments within the Module Schizosomatics Module
In this module, we were encouraged to start from a point that we are stuck with and find a potential to tackle it and share a possible solution within the group of our co-students by sharing an element of our artistic praxis.

Feedback from my peers:
-The invitations have expanded ideas on walking and my peers had space to explore things differently.
-The invitation to change one thing at their concept of walking to make it more accessible to diverse bodies made some people feel that they need to represent a body that is not theirs.
- The wording concept of walking confused some people.

12/03/2024 Exercising my Walking practice- 5 am walk in Limassol(Duration 1hr)
Walking alone in the streets of my city trying to avoid main roads while trying to remain safe and calm my fears as it is still night outside.
I navigate intending to get lost, of visiting places that I haven't visited before which is a challenge as I know the city very well. I avoid the sea side road as it leads to the sea and as it is a designated street for pedestrians. I enjoy the city that is still sleeping, that is still quiet, empty of cars. The only people around me are people that shall remain invisible like cleaners, garbage cleaners and people that are carrying their homes on their backs. I feel scared when these people are men. I change pavement, or I deviate my path.I ask my self: How much can I embrace otherness if I am so scared of walking on the street alone in the dark?
I observe the development of the city critically but I also find images that make me imagine tastes that bring me back to my childhood.

13/03 Exercising my artistic practice 5.30am Walk in Limassol (Duration 1hr)
This time I am less scared because around this time the sky opens up. It's not day but its not night either. I am in this in-between state. Between visible and invisible I feel that everyone I see around me is conspiring in my mission. A mission I still don't know what it is. I see an old man feeding many cats, I see the colorful shop of a fruit market. I find Saripolou square, a square that I always avoided consciously because its gentrified and full of people and now I find myself strolling happily through it, I see men cleaning shamelessly. I observe houses that still have a character in this architectural madness of the city center. I feel hope!!

14/03/2024 Walk (Duration: 43mins 4914 steps in Limassol) What can love become today?
Love can become a small stone path, full of pot of flowers in the middle of concrete walls. It can become a drawing of a blindfolded child who is holding a stick to bang a piñata made of a black plastic bag full of trash. It can become the light that signals the in-between state of night and day. It can become 4914 pointless fallings and catchings of yourself.

15/03 6551 steps Duration:1hr in Limassol What can love become today?
Love can become an unknown state. A threshold of a space that is unclear whether is private or public. It can become a path that it is designed and designated for bodies made of water. A path that leads you through pipes and low ceilings, a path that remains out of the sight of the developers and business people. A path that sustains the wilderness of the city. A path that makes your feet unstable from the uneven rocks you are stepping on. A path that makes you negotiate your space with the flowers, the plants, the ants, and the cats that exist around you.

Images from 12/03/2024

Images from 15/03/2024

15/03/2023 Reflections on POWER.
How do I define power in my research so it is not an abstract term?
What are the factors I want to manipulate to check the notion of power for myself and others ?

Keywords: Listening, allowing time, avoiding predefined choices and predefined spaces, avoiding main roads, letting things emerge, enabling negotiation-structure the score in a way that ensures equity between bodies so they have equal chances to negotiate.

Strategies for potency instead of power:
-Always allow the first decision for direction to come from the other partner.
-Allow the option for people to give a blank page. NO answer is an answer.
-Allow people to pause or end the score earlier.
-Have an emergency signal to break the silence and talk if need be.
-Discovering/imagining thresholds in the city.
-Navigating in the in-between spaces, the liminal spaces of the city, noticing what is left behind, on your left and right.
-Challenge linearity in direction, pace and rhythm.
-Remain in the in-between the whole time. Challenge yourself, your rhyme, the other.

Beginning from a place of not knowing might also unlock people to answer this question making the power of knowledge, and the pressure of answering correctly irrelevant. How to rephrase the question "What can love become today?" to embrace the notion of not knowing?

It can become the smell and the light of a few candles burning in a hidden religious room that is open for people to enter at any time. It can become the smile of a person who is standing in the middle of the street, waiting patiently for the aging person they are accompanying to take the next step. It can become 7376 +1 aimless shifts of the weight of the pelvis from right to left.

Feedback from my peers:
-The scores were playful and they enjoyed it
-Some felt nice with the idea that they were following their map.

19-23/02 One to one Walking Scores. During this week I had been trying out a 1-1 walking score having Rozet as the starting point. Version 2 is just one question and not 2 and it came after the feedback of my my co-walkers.
General Feedback: It was very playful. It needs time to start playing around with it, in the beginning, there was a lot of uncertainty but questions could not be asked because of the rule of silence but as time passed by, the thing was unfolding itself. Time is important to tune in for the question- to answer from an embodied state and not purely from logic.
-Why does this question in the end and not any other question?- It would maybe be handy to think of how to tune in a bot the participants about the topic from before. How much information is given?

25/02-01/03 Drawing the field of my research- Chapter 1- Draft 2

Text can be downloaded here.

19/03 1hr 2min 7020 steps. What can love become today?

8/04 45 mins. 5530 steps. What can love become today? Alone

It can become a painting of resistance to the Russian propaganda narratives in front of a building of power that is being safeguarded by a police car.

3984 βήματα,στιγμές, εμπειρίες, σεβασμός, συναίνεση, ησυχία. - 3984 steps, moments, respect, consent, silence

Οι καρποί, το κατρατζύλιν, το μοίρασμα τζαι το παιχνίδι. -The fruits, the slide, the sharing and playing.

Η αγάπη μπορεί να είναι όπως το 4242 που είναι ισοταξικός αρθμός. Love can be like 4242 an "equal-class" number.

5480 βήματα,μια μπάλα παιδική, μια εδώ και μια εκεί, κάποτε μαζί-κάποτε στις μου χαμένος. Επιστροφή στον τόπο απ΄όπου ξεκινήσαμε. -5480 steps, a child's ball, once here and then there, sometimes together-sometimes lost in my thoughts. Back to the place where we started.

Love can become a bench placed on a pavement of the city center facing the wall of its opposite building. It can become an electrical advertisement sign that is empty. It can become the smell of the lemon blossoms that remind you of the spring in this grey landscape.

16/03 Duration: 1hr 3m at 6.40 am. 7376 steps. What can love become today?

One to one walks on the 2th, 3rd and 4th of April (Total four walks)
Imagine that we have no clue what is love and what it can do. What can it become today based on the experience of this walk as well as based on this number that came out? Try to invent its meaning just for today!

Greek responses from the participants( English transaltion provided by me

My responses after the walks

Μπορεί να γίνει η αναπνοή που σε ήρεμα αμάν φοβάσαι επειδή συναντάς κάτι ανοικειο. 4242 χαμένες ματιές. Ματιές που γυρεύουν να βρουν νόημα στο τίποτε.

Μπορεί να εγινετουν η συνεχής επαγρύπνηση τζαι διαρκές θέληση να επαναπροσδιορισεις την κατεύθυνση σου για να ακολουθήσεις ποτέ το ένστικτο σου τζαι ποτέ τα βήματα άλλων σωμάτων. 4450 πιέσεις στο πάτωμα.

Θα εμπορουσεν να γίνει μια μυστική συμφωνία μεταξύ δύο να αδιαφορησουν σε ένα κάλεσμα προσβλητικό τζαι απρόσκλητο.θα εμπορουσεν να ήταν 4650 πίεσης του πέλματος στην γη.

Θα μπορούσεν γίνει η γνώση του ότι κάτι εν οδηγα πουποτε αλλά τζεινον το πουποτε να σου δια την χαρά του μαζί. Θα μπορούσε να γίνει 4691 τρόποι χαμόγελου συναίνεσης.