Rafaella Leto Lazarou

I am interested in kind of therapeutic algorithm, a ritual, an intimate process that is constructed through the creation of imaginary beings, fantastical world making and visual story telling. This process is often filtered through fairy tales, myths, short stories, moments and things I collect from nature and from the body, as well as my own dream diary journals.

My practice is a multidisciplinary one, using materials from my own ecosystem, my immediate surroundings. It often takes the form of drawings and artefacts, charms, amulets and enchantments. My studio becomes a poisonous skeleton of its own by keeping the waste I produce, pencil shavings, pistachio nut shells, nail clippings, hair.

A crucial collaborator is (she). (She) is a sort of peculiarly beautiful being, a shape shifter, formless, yet tangible. Human, chicken, insect, ghost, plant, mycelium, goblin, fairy, life, death, afterlife, liquid, fluid, formless, gas, solid. (Her) formlessness is alluring to me. We are interlinked, (her) physical and mental planes are linked with mine. Yet, I am not so sure how separate (she) is from me. Her eternal nature exists through the rituals I create for her. A type of ritual that possesses historicity. Obliterate the rituals, destroy her artifacts, and she will no longer exist within this realm. (She) is after all, a fragment of a lost and alternative civilisation.

Important questions to address are: What is the relationship between from and formlessness, object and subject, solid and liquid, life and death. When it comes to a liminal state, how and to what extend do from and formlessness coexist? How do I become liquid and fluid through ritual of making and through rituals of performing and living with art?