{"id":109,"date":"2026-07-17T08:42:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T08:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thaliaraftopoulou.com\/?page_id=109"},"modified":"2026-10-06T18:13:36","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T18:13:36","slug":"publications","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/thaliaraftopoulou.com\/?page_id=109","title":{"rendered":"projects"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
01<\/span>Ascends Summer Or Descends Winter? Flower<\/em><\/a>\"\"Tell the Unseen<\/em><\/a>03<\/span>Lead Thunder<\/em><\/a>\"\"Sound and Listening in the Athenian Apartment Building<\/em><\/a><\/svg>video<\/span>\"\"World of Throat Trilogy<\/em><\/a>\"\"It\u2019s Like That, and That\u2019s the Way I Am<\/em><\/a><\/svg>video<\/span>\"\"Soothing Sounds for a Difficult Hour<\/em><\/a>\"\"SEG Fridge<\/em><\/a>\"\"Work of Art Alterations Store<\/em><\/a><\/svg>2 videos<\/span>\"\"Getting There and The Walls Are Made of Paper<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Ascends Summer Or Descends Winter? Flower<\/em>, 2022<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Video Essay, Duration 12:29, language Greek.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An interpretation of flowers and different approaches of the process of blooming as transitional aid or as means of accepting transitionality. The work tracks the heavy load of springtime and different desire paths, like that of certain urges for ceaseless renaissance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The video essay was featured in the exhibition titled ANTHOPOLEION at or.artspace<\/a> in Koukaki in early May 2022. It emerged from a two-month art workshop coordinated and curated by visual artist, anthropologist, and doctor in Social Psychology, Elpida Rikou. The exhibition as a whole delved into themes of sexualities, feminisms, environmental concerns, and reflected personal, philosophical, and aesthetic pursuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tell the Unseen<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

16\u201326 November 2023 Exhibition & Participatory Project, Anichta Pania Festival (Open Sails Festival), Chania, Crete<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Curator:<\/strong> Eleanna Pontikaki
Artists:<\/strong> Scope Architects, Vasso Protopapadaki, Thalia Raftopoulou<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tell the Unseen<\/em><\/strong> was conceived as a participatory, site-responsive project that activated the collective memory of Chania through the personal narratives of its residents. Situated at the intersection of artistic research, social engagement, and spatial practice, the project examined the city as a living archive, where individual memories, everyday experiences, and embodied knowledge shape urban identity beyond official historical narratives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on oral testimonies and lived experiences, the participating artists developed new commissions that transformed intimate accounts into spatial, visual, and performative propositions. Rather than documenting memory, the project treated it as an active and relational process through which the city is continuously produced, negotiated, and imagined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Curated by Eleanna Pontikaki, the exhibition brought together site-specific installations, multimedia works, performances, workshops, and public interventions, presented throughout the historic building of the 1st Experimental Gymnasium of Chania in close dialogue with its architecture and school community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I contributed a participatory performance alongside five site-specific works installed in the school’s former chemistry laboratory. Emerging from conversations with local residents, my works explored water as both material and metaphor- an element through which questions of memory, place, vulnerability, resilience, and collective endurance unfold. By engaging listening, oral testimony, and spatial experience, the installation invited visitors to encounter the invisible affective landscapes that continue to inhabit the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stories on Concrete Ping-Pong Tables<\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Participatory Performance & Listening Exercise
1st Experimental Gymnasium of Chania, 16 November 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stories on Concrete Ping-Pong Tables<\/em> emerged from the material history of the concrete ping-pong tables installed at the school during the mid-1980s as part of a broader political vision for durable public sports infrastructure. Their raw concrete materiality and modernist design appeared strikingly unfamiliar within the island landscape. During the development of the work, artist Vasso Protopapadaki recalled that when the tables first appeared, “it was as if they had fallen from the moon.”<\/em> This memory became a conceptual point of departure for the performance, approaching the tables not simply as sporting equipment but as social artefacts carrying histories of place, public life, and collective memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tracing the cultural trajectory of table tennis, from its origins in late nineteenth-century England to its contemporary use in Parkinson’s rehabilitation, the work considers the game as a social technology capable of cultivating attention, care, and intergenerational exchange. While contemporary competitive table tennis increasingly privileges speed, technique, and precision, this action reclaims play as a space for listening, conversation, and encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The participatory performance unfolded through remained close to the score proposed. Participants were invited to play table tennis while simultaneously sharing personal memories connected to the city of Chania. Students from the 1st Experimental Gymnasium of Chania, visitors to the exhibition, and members of the local community took part in the action, allowing narratives to emerge through movement, rhythm, interruption, and exchange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It Will Spurt Back<\/em>, 2024<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Drawing, 150 x 152cm, ecolines, acrylic paint, ink, pencil, tracing paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The painting entitled “It Will Spurt Back” is a response to K.’s story, an incident she reported during the Tell the Unseen project. It was a moment of harassment, indecent exposure, and abandonment in a public place in Chania at a young age. This work focuses on K.’s resilience as she recounts these traumatic events today. It borrows the popular expression that refers to the growth of plants after pruning as a metaphor for the vital force with which an entity can grow despite abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Murmuring Wave<\/em>, 2024<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Site specific installation, 2024, 62 x 47 x 11cm. Birchwood, stickers scrap, photograph, stencil, knitting needles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The work responds to an oral history of a resident who recalls an impulsive winter night dip in the sea near the Venetian Neoria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Imagine an Owl, The Memory of the Municipal Garden With Animals<\/em>, 2024<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Site specific installation. Dimensions variable. Steatite, stickers scrap, drawing ink on Arches, book from the Hellenic Ornithological Society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In the narratives of the residents of Chania, memories of the Municipal Garden with animals are inscribed through phrases that include a multi-sensory recall of these experiences. Animal smells, the sudden appearance and disappearance of small rodents on the ground in the evenings, the sense of comradery and protection that animals inspired in the garden children of the time. B.’s story weaves together the adolescent memory of the company of an owl, an experience that at the time had for them magic dimensions. Their fascination with the animal’s non-verbal communication sets this memory among the most remarkable. The dynamic of this story is the “quiet” presence of the animal and the parallel play of the children underneath it, as if to validate the secret agreement of organic coexistence between them that can guarantee, like a divine presence, that it will keep them safe from harm. The artist in this work attempts to reconstitute through materials how an owl can be imprinted without knowing what it actually looks like, and conveys the collective memory of the existence of animals in a garden living in captivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Depth of the Distance from Maleme to Key Bar<\/em>, 2024<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Site specific installation. Found bottle and wooden ornamental hand, among chemistry test tubes and other chemistry research gear, dimensions variable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Water as a common good is a concept inscribed in the stories shared by the residents of Chania for the project in various ways, raising issues at different levels. The installation borrows the concept of “Bodies of Water” from Astrida Neimanis’ hydrofeminism and uses wood to convey the liquid in its material form. In the ocean of a lifetime’s memory, a single memory can hold more value and retain a soothing freshness that can be more precious than many gallons of pure water. This work attempts to spatially develop both the soothing power and the emotional value of this memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lead Thunder<\/em>, 2021<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Sound Installation in animal salon. Dimensions variable. Curated by COMOTIRIO<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A sound sculpture that becomes the host of a recorded conversation with my daughter Athena, focusing on hybrid creatures found between toys, cartoons, and imagined beings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the urban noise of Mesogeion Avenue, I enter the animal salon The Creatures<\/em> and \u201cI am transported in a magical way somewhere else\u201d\u2014parrot calls, a chirp, two decapods huddling together. \u201cPerceptual confusion is succeeded by an inexplicable aesthetic pleasure […] in the absence of any discernible form of order or regulation\u201d (Augoyard\u2013Torgue).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This encounter recalls the sonic phenomenon of Sharawadji<\/strong>, translated as \u201cchaotic beautiful,\u201d where beauty emerges through a momentary suspension of recognizable order. This experience resonates with Kristeva\u2019s approach to the relationship between the abject and the sublime: a simultaneous attraction and disturbance produced by encounters with unfamiliar forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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PhD \u201cSound and Listening in The Athenian Apartment Building\u201d<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Sound files from the research \u2014 Appendix 2<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sound notes<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Abstract: The research attempts to move through fields and notions, voice and orality in the context of the polykatoikia as a local, almost modern housing solution, to focus on the microscale of how the voices of the inhabitants and of the researcher resonate sound affectivities while living in today’s apartments. Focusing on the neighborhood of Metaxourgeio in Athens, Greece, and examining specific cases from other suburbs (2011- 2020)- the researcher tries out possible interpretations of different articulations of acoustic experiences of the inhabitants and of her own. She places her attention on how these interpretations can contribute to the discussions on perception that reside in matters and processes of creating space, implementing astute ways of regulating affordances through different levels of receptivity and response- ability. The in between spaces are considered as thresholds within the metaphor of the polykatoikia as sound vessel that brings in the reflective process the affects of absorption and resonance. Whilst mapping ways of listening, different entries of the notions of sound, silence, noise, voice, are traced, focusing on how they can possibly be anchored in issues concerning cohabitation and noise as space or comforting sound. Along with the field work, during the course of the research, responding to research questions stemming from her artistic practice and taking under consideration specific areas of sound studies, discourses on artistic research, as well as the socio-architectural context of the polykatoikia, she implemented domestic and field recordings, experimental actions and reflections on the auto ethnographic methodology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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World of Throat Trilogy<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Three projects explore specific mnemosonic affects, spoken-word possibilities, and the relationship between voice, memory, and public space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stou Gialou ta Votsalakia<\/em>, action, Athens, 25\/10\/2007<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Passer by singer: Stella Chronopoulou<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A passerby hums the song Stou Gialou ta Votsalakia by Vassilis Tsitsanis, on the kerbside near other passers-by intending to plant an earworm- to transmit the urge for passers-by to unconsciously hum the same song later in their day. Earworm is said to occur when a melody is involuntarily repeated in the mind, resulting in a “cognitive itch”. The work emphasizes this sound affect and the impact of specific melodies so as to hold on to this sonic effect on the move in actual time and to underline the transformative power of melodic rhythms and their emotions, of sound and enunciation, that can be capable of transmitting something from one bodymind to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This work was first presented at Electro Media Works Festival, Athens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Serenade From The Fans<\/em>, Leipzig, 14\/2\/2008<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Field work and public space action<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This work is a love song dedicated to my husband, who remained in Athens while I was studying in Weimar. On Valentine\u2019s Day, I attempted to create a new fan chant for the friendly football match between Roter Stern Leipzig and SV West, reworking Iggy Pop\u2019s \u201cI Wanna Be Your Dog\u201d<\/em> as a gesture of affection and belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project explores the fan chant as a public sonic form- a space where voices, stories, emotions, and political positions can be transmitted and reimagined. By shifting the function of the slogan from support and identification towards personal narrative, the work examines how collective vocal practices can carry intimate and alternative meanings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developed during the first semester of the MFA programme Public Space and New Artistic Strategies<\/em> at Bauhaus- University Weimar, under the supervision of Professor Mick O\u2019Kelly and supported by the State Scholarship Foundation, the work forms the second part of a trilogy together with Stou Gialou Ta Votsalakia<\/em> and We\u2019ve Loved Before<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We\u2019ve Loved Before<\/em>, 2011<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Sound installation<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Every morning at 9, from the open window of the first floor kitchen, the sound of Henri Mancini’s song, We’ve Loved Before<\/em>, reaches the other apartments of the building through the skylight. In this work, the skylight is activated as a means of transmitting sound into the apartment building and a constructed sense of habit. The work was part of an art action and group exhibition in an apartment for rent on Alexandras Street in Athens. The exhibits were presented to the prospective tenants at the same time as the house, thus enriching the subsoil of the house in an unexpected way. The action negotiated the notions of the modern and the practical, the materiality of the built and the intimate and explored the space between supply and demand in the context of the housing market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Visitors could take home the mini CD with the recording of the song as heard in the skylight on the first morning.
This work is part of the participatory action and group exhibition FOR RENT.
Participant artists and co-curators:
Erify Veneri, Grace Bayer Prince, Sofia Donna, Theodora Provopoulou, Thalia Raftopoulou, Alexia Sarantopoulou, Katerina Saratsioti, Afroditi Festa, Stella Chronopoulou, i.architects<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Video \u2014 1 of 2<\/p>

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