ELENA AYA BUNDURAKIS

Metronom: Eating Magma (2017-ongoing) is a complex and multifaceted project that explores the notion of being a living organism in a world that is melting and regenerating itself constantly and rapidly. In your practice, you often intermingle environmental installations, drawings, video, and haikus into unusual combinations in order to give visible life to your own imagination and reality: what inspires you to create these oneiric narrations?

Elena Aya Bundurakis: They are not necessarily narrations, I’d rather think of them as pieces from various sensations of a living organism, wishing to be put out there and form a document of aliveness. Observing the way the collective physical body looks and feels, the complexity in its build-up but also its embedded ways of moving, existing, and experiencing within the surrounding world… I find that very moving. The thought of being a tiny particle of the collective body, my experience as a human specimen interacting in data-driven worlds, and having so many other bodies (human/non-human) around me to move on together, feels like so many things… smothering, encouraging, disgusting, inspiring. All these different feelings inspire and finally are the work.

M: In your series Looking for Summer in the Middle of My Adulthood (2015-ongoing), you revisit your family photographic archive in dialogue with images created specifically to confront your past and self. What is the role of your camera in this process of self-investigation and auto-storytelling? 

EAB: Self-investigation by looking into your roots is like diving into a dark bottomless lake: no specific route to follow and no expected ending but you can understand yourself more by listening to your fears while diving. The camera is a tool to help the dive, the connective tissue between my subconscious thoughts and the environment I photograph at the moment, the nowness.

M: You often use the camera as a tactile device, rather than a technological tool and in your latest work in progress Wip (2020-2021), your interest in transmitting sensations and textures overtakes any other concern. Can you tell us a bit more on this project and on this urgency to transmit feelings rather than concepts?

EAB: As with my previous work, I like the thought of starting and later on expanding a work, focusing around a specific sensation I got to experience at some point. I have always started with such sensations, which in the process started to articulate themselves into explanatory words or meanings, that at the beginning seemed indescribable. In this project, some concepts that intrigue me are for example how it feels and what it means to have existed in the womb of your grandmother? The thought that part of us has been within the bodies of our grandmothers since all of our mothers’ eggs were created while she was herself an embryo in her mothers’ belly. So is it possible that we carry the stress and dreams of our grandmothers within our own bodies?

M: You were born in Crete from a Greek-Japanese family and you are based among Corfu and Crete. How these cultures combine in your creative process and how these influences inform your art?

EAB: I spent 3 years in Belgium, where I also studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. It was definitely a formative time because it provided a space where I was away from my known experiences until then. Developing work while being in the environment of the Academy was an important part too. There is so much discourse about the academic environment being anachronous or even limiting at times, but for me, it was very helpful. Although I wasn’t being particularly communicative or actively seeking support, knowing that my friends and teachers were there if I needed it, was a precious feeling. Right now I am back in Crete, but also spending time in Corfu island for a new project space that we are developing there.
Growing up in a Greek and Japanese home was kind of a messy mix but also fun and colorful. There are cultural stereotypes that we tend to assume, but people can be of their own, so different from what we imagine them to be. I guess that besides the cultures, it’s very much also about the people we grow with and around, that subconsciously form our processes. My mother for example was a Japanese woman who traveled the world with her best friend and decided to marry a Greek man in the late 70s’ in a country that was just out of military junta, despite her family not supporting her choice. So she didn’t fit the racialized subordinate stereotypes of an Asian woman that many people, unfortunately, tend to have in their minds, still today.

Elena Aya Bundurakis (1988, Crete) works and lives between Crete and Corfu.
Graduated in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, she combines several media in her work, such as photography, drawing, video and haiku poetry. Bundurakis conceives specific installations and unusual combinations, developed both in editorial projects and in environmental installations. Among her recent exhibitions: Generation Z, Noorderlicht festival, Groningen (2020); Nature in Play, Metronom Gallery, Modena (2020); Hate Speech, Aggression und Intimitat, Km Kunstlerhaus, Graz, AU (2019); Currents #6: Good Intentions, Marres Maastricht, BE (2019); Bring Your Photobook, L’Image sans nom & Galerie Wégimont, Liege, BE (2019); Blurring the Lines, Paris College of Arts, Paris (2018); COOK IT BAKE IT or FORGET IT!, Zuiderpershuis, Antwerp, BE (2018); PPLATS #1, Photographic Centre Peri, Turku, FI (2018).

Cover images from the series Eating Magma (2017 – in progress)

26/04/2021