Communication Design School of Design

Zoe Kravvariti (she / her )

My practice feeds from understanding and communicating emotions. By finding ways to visualise the internal, hidden and unspoken, I aim is to give importance to feelings that people tend to overlook. I draw my inspiration through research into theory and observation of the performativity of everyday life. Sensitive themes as memory, time and the female experience appear in many of my projects as recurring themes and I consider them to be explorations that are never ending. The use of movement and the body as means of communication, are deeply embedded within my work, as I believe them to be mediums where emotions can be communicated clearer than with words. I avoid limiting myself to a specific medium, by letting my concepts speak on what feels as the more appropriate way to deliver my ideas. By exposing and expressing myself in my work, i intend to provoke feelings which people suppress.

Contact
zoe.kravv@gmail.com
Instagram
Projects
Raging Bodies
Killing The Angel
House
A collection of poems
Fragments
The hand that feeds

Collaborative Works
How We Got To Where We Are Now
Daughter Cells

Raging Bodies

Raging Bodies is an on-going project, that explores the complex relationship between women and their anger. When ideals of passivity shape the feminine nature, it forces us, women to internalise and disguise our anger with shame and to replace our voice with silence. For a woman to be passive is to live a life of shrinking. It’s to blame her body. It’s to restrict her body. It’s to disrespect her body. For that woman to reveal her anger is to break her silence and set herself free. This work aims to embody this inner struggle through separate works of performance, writing and drawing.Each of the ways I approached this project, aimed to speak for the struggle of any woman who has been taught to stay silent. For the realisation of this project, research was a fundamental aspect. I consider my final essay as the very starting point of this exploration, as it heavily inspired my visualisations. I divided the work produced for this project, into smaller individual briefs.

Each work can be explored under its individual heading: Killing the angel, This House,  Fragments, A Hand That Feeds

 

Killing The Angel

” if i had not killed her she would have killed me”

This work was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s piece ‘Killing the Angel  in the House’. Woolf referred to the Angel as that inner voice that stops women from speaking their mind. The Angel in the house originally referred to the ideal Victorian woman. She was pure, passive and submissive. As Virginia Woolf wrote “she sacrificed herself daily”. Every woman seems to have been followed by that angel. The Angel of today’s society, has definitely lost its power, without that implying however that women don’t still suffer by the ideals of the past. This piece is an improvisational video performance looking at a woman’s inner battle until she let’s go of her passivity. Following three character’s, three inner voices that exist within a woman’s mind, i aim to encapsulate the struggle of detaching from self restriction as well as the power that comes along with it.

 

 

House

‘House’  is a collection of my initial improvisations that formed the structure of my final film ‘Killing The Angel’. Collected here are both the links to video recorded improvs as well a selection of stills, that I consider to be individual pieces.

A collection of poems

Fragments

For these series i recontextualised sequential imagery by painting and addition of text, in order to introduce new narratives. I aimed for these stories to feel like a part of a bigger narrative, where you can’t place what is beggining, middle or end. I worked with imagery by Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of motion .

The hand that feeds

How We Got To Where We Are Now

After asking the three questions (Where are we going? How are we getting there? What are we leaving behind?) I asked some people to draw How We Got To Where We Are Now on a ripped piece of packaging, of which we tend to discard without much thought. This open-ended question provoked some interesting responses, with some people illustrating how humankind got to the present moment beginning with the Big Bang, and others simply drew the route we took up the stairs and through the corridor to the room where I asked them the questions. Each and every response is a representation of how others view the world, and the diversity of our thoughts.

How We Got To Where We Are Now

Daughter Cells

Formed from questionnaires sent to mothers and their daughters, this moving image piece visualises the conventions of maternity and femininity, and their building conflict; heightened by the mother daughter relationship. Dependence, separation and mutual understanding underpin the piece’s narrative, which appropriates the biological language of mitosis and the iconic biblical imagery of Mother Mary to reveal the interstice between the primal and the social, and the heritage carried within this innate bond.