ARTiculAction
Natasha Papadopoulou
Dancing in the Dark
grams of dance poses before realizing a whole performance recorded on photo-paper. However the actual piece was done in one long night in a dark dance studio, and developed in a photo darkroom days later. The installation was the most challenging because photo-paper is very heavy at this size. Now let's focus on your art production: I would start from your performative work "DANCING IN THE DARK", a 37 meters long photogram that our readers have already admired in the starting pages of this article. Would you tell us something about the genesis of this project? What was your initial inspiration?
Dancing in the Dark
I was living in NY at the time dividing my time between dance and image-making . I wanted to create a performance for the photo medium only, a never seen action that relied only in its imprint on photosensitive paper, and that could be experienced as a whole. My idea was to obscure the margins of performance in time and reframing them in length.
disciplinary practices, however in my practice I have moved through disciplines in relation to the progress of the visual culture. It is unavoidable for my personality, the more tools I can process to creatively speak, I will use. For example I recently started to use ceramics but only in order to construct props for a video piece. As for the performative aspect of my work and the visual structure they forever remain but evolve. All those disciplines are tools for one single minded work, but as technical as this world has gotten one has to be super strict with his practice not to use the multitude of tools available. Nevertheless i don't consider my practice a mix of artistic fields rather than one than manifests in multiple ways.
Your art practice ranges from Installations, to performance, to photography: while crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a synergy between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?
As an artist I admire both the single and multi 26