Identity Crisis

The project brings to light, both my own personal confusion and struggle as well as our society’s itself, evaluating the meaning of Identity. We cross the era where social media doubt our authenticity. This installation consists of seven metal sculptures and puts identity into a re-examination itself nowadays, through a forged theater.

We live the epoch where identity and authenticity are disputed. In Greek, word crisis means revision, something ceases to be original and turns into something new, without knowing its “destination”. Meanwhile, due to all these colonial disasters our world is facing, the identity both personal and each nation must be reevaluated. Humanity now, uses many masks. All this experimentation takes place in an open theatre, life, a space that births identities, values and roles.

Through this project I reflect my own crisis. Being Greek, coming to the Netherlands, my past came into a dialogue with the present. Greece atypically was and still is under post-colonial intentions of foreign countries for any exploitation through investments and tourism. My country is always facing challenges to re-examine itself, as I did, like the one in 2010 to be considered or not part of the European Union.

Now, existing in a country of a strong digital world I discovered my identity of my sexuality. I grew up surrounded by images of naked marble bodies showing masculinity by a juvenile beauty, seeking for elegance. Today’s beauty turns algorithmic when gender searches for identity in a “beautiful world”. Implanting this heritage in a modern vision of what is my culture in the present, the travel that I did physically and mentally guides me to question my identity through these works.

A vast part of forms of my cultural syntax emphasizes the transition by being blended with filters of the digital age, our reality. The stereotypical marble which is synonymous with Greek culture is replaced by weary steel and brass mirroring the prices of our contemporary values.