{ Katerina Markoulaki portolio/cv }

Bell Hooks writes in her book all about love (1992), thus detaching the notion of "love" from
being "in love" and continues in a denunciatory yet deeply personal text about how society fails to learn ways of loving, of emotional contact, while at the same time proposing toxic models of relationships. Audre Lorde, in her essay Uses of Erotic speech: erotic speech as Power (1980) , uses a love poem to her then partner as a starting point, proposing the use of women's erotic speech as a practice of exercising power and feminist assertion of the public sphere.
The 'Kapsura Project' began as a form of creative research between nine women artists, addressing the cultural identity of the term "Kapsoura" in the Mediterranean and the East, and it's almost impossibly difficult translation - both etymologically and contextually - on other Western frameworks.
The nine artists attempt to raise questions about the transformation of the partially outdated cultural feeling of "kapsoura". How is it experienced in postmodernism? How is "kapsoura" expressed by different subjects of different genders and identities? What is the relationship between "kapsoura" and nature, religion,beautification, urbanism, or the political scene of the 90s? Can "kapsoura" and its erotic speech become more dominant and feminist; can it break or surpass gender roles?
Is "kapsoura" a battlefield?
For us the dialogue regarding 'kapsoura" is missing from the mainstream social discourse, as much as the dialogue regarding the meaning of love, of emotional connection, female desire and sexuality - or if it is not completely missing, it is often overlooked as something trivial or irrelevant, especially if the narrator is female. By stripping kapsoura of its banal nature, we venture into new ways of exploring female lust and passion. We negotiate our personal experience, trauma and connection to the term, by suggesting different ways of seeing and experiencing it.
For us, a woman that talks about her feelings is always a ticking time bomb.
The kapsoura/loveburn exhibition functions as a form of a "de profundis" confession. It challenges the traditional form of a love letter, becoming a love letter itself; to the unfulfilled, to sexuality, pain, coexistence, connection, the public and the private. Above all, the exhibition acts as a love letter to the obsession with the abstract object of desire of the collaborating artists.

Curation:
Katerina Markoulaki
Raisa Desypri

Participant artists:
Vasilia Sofr
Katerina Markoulaki
Olga Vereli
Raisa Desypri
Fwteini Kitiani
Chraja

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Photos Kostantinos Andrikoulas