Visualizing the Unseen - A conversation with Stella Ioannidou

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimcha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of The Critical Practices Program in fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open ended process of relationing which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, I am in conversation with Stella Ioannidou, an artist, designer and urban researcher based between Athens and New York. Stella's practice oscillates between the fields of architectural and urban research, of critical cartography and visual experimentation in an attempt to analyze and reflect on existing systems of governance, economy and infrastructure, as well as on the socio-spatial dimensions that reproduce conditions of injustice. Stella is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement VII with a collective research focus on the notion of community economies. Today, we discuss how the spaces we share can help us construct narratives of mutual sustenance.

Thank you for having me Myrto.

Thank you for accepting my invitation. I would like to start this conversation today by discussing a little bit about your practice that has adapted to different forms over the years, but always bringing forth, if I could say, your ongoing interest into unearthing facts. Looking at it either from a social or a spatial and material perspective, the notion of stratification is at the intersection of the various fields within which you develop your work and I would like to ask you, what are the layers you are mostly interested in undigging?

I would say that my practice has always revolved around identifying patterns, underlying structures, hidden narratives and layers, in one way or another, even though I have shifted in medium quite a bit. Initially, I studied civil engineering in Athens and I did my thesis on computational geotechniques, because I found that to be the more research oriented field in the school. I then moved to New York and that is where I studied architecture and within the discipline I gravitated towards a more urban, socio-spatial and analytical approach, which connected with skill sets that I acquired in my undergraduate studies in engineering. But I went from studying the relationship between soil, foundation and superstructure to studying the interaction of larger scale urban systems and how they determine how we live or how these systems produce or reproduce social inequality.

I am really interested in identifying and making visible narratives that perhaps go unacknowledged, and that is something that can happen in many mediums. For instance, in a past work of mine, I have used data analysis, data visualization and critical cartography to research mass incarceration in New York City and the connection between poverty, racial minorities and targeted arrests by the NYPD. In that case, a quantitative approach was really powerful and it allowed me to create a compelling case for the structural failures of the city. But in other works, I have also struggled with the limitations of that kind of top down quantitative approach and I've run into dead ends, especially when I am trying to communicate someone's lived experience. I always ask myself, how is this work representing and doing justice to the people and their embodied experiences, those who are most affected by these power structures of inequality, which is why I have been exploring other mediums as well, like writing and visual experimentation, also new media. They give me kind of a different storytelling flexibility. So to answer your question of what layers, I am mostly interested in unearthing, I think what I care about the most is finding the right frameworks, mediums and tools that can let me see through the urban, historical or other layers of a place and stitch through them in order to tell a story the way it needs or deserves to be told.

Over the past couple of years, there is an ongoing and developing discourse that traverses the art field, among many other social spheres, around care practices, affective and reproductive labor, and its redistribution. In times when we are facing more and more the impact of climate change and the scarcity of resources, and when the housing crisis and the economic inequalities intensify, I am wondering how can we build more equitable structures and how can architecture play a more decisive role towards an ethics of care?

This is something that came up quite a bit during our collective residency here —how the art and architecture discourse has lately shifted towards ideas of maintenance care, reproductive labor, etc.— and I think these ideas surfaced in our collective conscience very organically during the pandemic for everyone, because many of us became confronted with precarity and a complete absence of networks of support or care. And these needs remain urgent to this day now. But I find myself kind of conflicted with the discourse and how it has been co-opted by large art institutions or architecture offices that pay lip service to a theoretical restructuring of our relationship to capital and each other, while at the same time they produce and reproduce internally exploitative work structures. So the care discourse on a high level becomes just a way to gain cultural capital and in turn, access actual capital in the form of funding by structures like the EU or the Mellon Foundation, for example.

I think before architecture can speak about ethics of care, it needs to have a moment of internal reckoning and recognize that the discipline is pervaded by an ethos of individualism. What is glorified within architecture is the figure of the genius who is unrestrained, is obsessed with realizing a singular vision that is uncompromising and in that vision, every worker becomes disposable from the construction workers that build the project to the architectural workers that design it. All of them remain invisible in their labor. So the way the discipline works right now, both in professional practice, but even in academic or exhibition contexts, is entirely antithetical to any ideas of interdependence or mutual sustenance and an architecture that is predicated on subjugation and exploitation will only and can only perpetuate those values in its output. Where I am finding hope, though, is in the younger generation of art and architecture workers who are acknowledging the impasse we are at, not as a theoretical discourse —it is the material and embodied reality they live.

A couple of years ago, I started collaborating on a research project around labor and care with Ryan Leifield and Hasbrouck Miller, at a time when we were all feeling dissent and disappointment towards exploitative models that we came across in our professional lives, both as art and architectural workers, and our research was driven by our need to engage with different ways of working and knowing and existing. We engaged with feminist and indigenous knowledge. We looked at the natural world where we noticed that resilient and healthier forests tend to be those that encourage communication and cooperation through the mycorrhizal networks and kind of realized that to us, humans, like trees don't stand alone. We went back and forth between looking outward and looking in and prioritizing mutual support during our research project and searching for more instances of interdependence and commoning that could occur both in the architectural field, but in general. We identified some existing ones. For example, young architects and students create this kind of networks of support between friends and colleagues. It is common almost like an underground shared economy, where in order to access prohibitively expensive but necessary resources and allow for people to do work and develop their ideas, you know, they share passwords, things that they have access to through universities, through offices. That has evolved into an underground shared economy that is governed by many of the similar principles of the forest. So when you are participating in this kind of network and commoning in closed resources, we take care of our community, we form relationships of mutual aid and responsibility with each other. I think it is really important to identify these successful instances of commoning and mutual aid so that we can actually begin to visualize what equitable structures could look like, and hopefully from there, build more solidarity both within the existing profession by forming unions, for example, but also beyond by realizing completely new models of working horizontally and sharing together.

I am glad that you brought these contradictions that exist within the discursive field around care practices and I would like to go back to a project that you mentioned before. I am thinking that these shared resources, this network of shared resources that you were just describing is a network between peers, between people that have the same level of access to certain resources. I would like to go back to your previous project into mass incarceration in New York and your methodology with data visualization and analytics and all that stuff that you described and ask you, how did you approach this community? How did you approach this theme from this position that you had, this position of access?

Yeah, that's a good question. They were, I think, kind of two parts to my work and one of it was completely top down research where I had access to this open source data and that was entirely separate from community work. And then, in my community work I was actually going to the Rikers jail, which is the main jail of New York City. I was going there once a week for a few months as part of this project that was organized through a social worker. But it is also a very complicated issue. In the U.S., I am obviously coded as white and have to acknowledge that I am not part of the community that is being targeted by NYPD arrests. 95% of people who are detained in Rikers are black and Latino. I had no intention of trying to access a community and perhaps enact some exploitative kind of power dynamic with them, which is why I kind of focused on creating a tool that would be useful in the activist circles. Clara Dykstra and I, we both researched the timeline from arrest to arraignment in New York City which is the first 24 to 36 hours between arrest and arraignment and it is a very elaborate and obscure process. There is no guide for it.

So we kind of created this visual guide. It is an animation where you go from —it's like a spatial timeline— where you go from the moment of arrest and you can see all of the spaces and the different stakeholders you interact with —from police officers to lawyers to different bureaucratic entities— and that can be used obviously by anyone, but definitely is useful within the activist realm which we were part of. It actually became more useful in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests when some of the regulations that were in place before were changed just to allow for basically the violation of protesters rights. For example, there was a curfew in place that week of the protests. At 7 p.m. you weren't allowed to go out anymore and breaking that curfew became a Class B misdemeanor. So suddenly you had to enter a whole different scale of bureaucracy, which you could know was happening by using this guide and knowing what to expect and what your rights are. Also, during that week, they revoked the Habeas Corpus Act, which basically protects the individual from being held somewhere for more than 24 hours before being arraigned. So within 24 hours of arrest, you have to see a judge. They revoked it that week and had people during the COVID pandemic actually stay in jail for longer than they should. So, considering how we can actually be useful, considering our identities within these works that we are doing is really important and it is something that I am trying to always be mindful of.

You also brought this metaphor of the arboreal network and I am really glad that you brought that in, because I think it serves as a great metaphor for the term community economies, as it was coined by Gibson-Graham, where it describes this collective negotiation of our interdependence between all life forms. I am interested to know in going back to The School of Infinite Rehearsals and its theme Community Economies how did this term resonate with you?

I guess I have a double framework for this term. One is that coming from Greece I can't help but have faith in those ideas. I have witnessed community economies with various degrees of success here because there is a long tradition of self-organized communities and I don't just mean like the squats or anarchist collectives in Athens, but also overall in Greece and in Greek villages and islands like Ikaria, for example, that has a radical left heritage, there is an aspiration towards autonomy and smaller scale local economies that depend on community bonds. On the other hand, from a U.S. perspective, as we see economic violence unfolding, at the same time, there is also endless talk of community and community building. That's a paradox and it is often because any existing commons have already been threatened or destroyed by a capitalist ideology and competitiveness, individualism. And now the term community is being brought back in and used in order to ask of exploited people to fill in for the structural failures of the state. This neoliberal apparatus has been at work in Greece as well for some time now.

So I think it is important to be aware of how this term can be instrumentalized for the wrong reasons and how it can depend on the further exploitation of marginalized people. I am speaking specifically to the idea of: what is community? And I like to think of what Silvia Federici says that no common community is possible unless we refuse to base our life and our reproduction on the suffering of others. A community has to be intended not as an exclusive group or a gated reality in which people have shared interests that are separate from the others, but it has to describe a kind of quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility to each other, to the Earth, the seas, the animals and beyond.

During these seven weeks that you spent together in a sense, one could say that you formed your own community economy. The question of resources, the question of access to certain resources became a recurrent thread of your collective research, as far as I know and I am curious to hear more about this commoning of resources within your group.

Right. I think for most of us, having access to an institution and a collective fund was a departure from our reality outside the residency. So naturally, we talked a lot about our access to these resources, the responsibility that came with it, especially as we were supposed to be thinking about community economies. So we considered our extended networks and communities, our mycorrhizal networks and how we can bring them to communication with our group, have a conversation and exchange with them and acknowledge their time and expertize as labor that should be compensated. This way we wanted to create more access to the institutional resources, but also gain more knowledge and perspectives.

With that line of thinking, we organized a few visits and events with local initiatives, both in Thessaloniki, where we traveled in our second week actually of the residency, but also in Athens. For example, for one of them I invited Electra Karatza, who is a collaborator of ERGO Collective. She's also a cultural worker in Athens. Together we facilitated a conversation around exploitation in the art world, specifically from a female and feminist perspective and we also discussed about the potential, but also limitations of collectives. Are they a form or a medium in which we could be allowed to distribute power more horizontally, like acknowledge reproductive labor and center it? It was a really vivid conversation. A lot came up about how each of us in the group perceives the idea of a collective. Some people were talking about how a collective is about building larger structures in order to facilitate big groups and others were more interested in the intimate scale where we create space between a small group with each other and really form like a collective voice.

Another thing we acknowledged as a resource within our group very quickly after we started, was each other and the value of being together for this limited amount of time, because it is really rare that you can bring so many different perspectives in a room. So apart from considering community needs beyond the residency, each one of us was asked whether they have a specific need that could be fulfilled by the group —material or otherwise. In some cases, the most valuable resource was taking time to think together about an individual's project or work or problem and pulling together our experiences to create a repository of knowledge, like essentially commoning knowledge within the group.

You mentioned your trip to Thessaloniki and I am wondering whether you had the chance to meet with any communities there and whether you had a chance to witness an example of a community economy.

Yeah, actually we were very lucky because a member of our group is from Thessaloniki so he was gracious enough to facilitate some meetings with initiatives that he knows there. So, we did an exercise at the end of our residency where each of us had to say what they're taking away. Maybe it could be, you know, just takeaways from the residency and it could be just a memory, a word or anything and we kind of did a broken telephone exercise where each of us told the other person what we are thinking, and then they had to write it down. And we kind of wrote this all together, created this like soup of everyone and looking back into that, we saw that more than a few people had referenced our visit to the kindergarten in Thessaloniki. So I think that one was a really meaningful one for us. It is an initiative called Little Tree and it is a female led, kindergarten, self-organized. I think they follow the Montessori kind of teaching and they have a limited amount of children, obviously, because that is what they can accommodate. But the way they are thinking about their initiative was really, really powerful and everything was very well thought out. Specifically, one thing that they said to us that I think perfectly kind of summed up what community economies is about is that they never turn away someone who can't pay, because if an individual doesn't have access to resources, it is not the individual's problem. It is a community problem.

That's the perfect way to take me to my next question. The invisible time of labor, the difference between productive and unproductive time actually became the central point of your collective research that attempted to put in place a caring infrastructure in the form of a gift to the community of Onassis AiR, if I could say that. I am thinking about this notion of reciprocity and what Graeber describes as "from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs". I was wondering, how does this principle feed into your collective thinking?

Yeah, as I said before, being in a position of institutional access, we all definitely felt collective responsibility towards our respective communities, also the artist community at large, and we took the time to acknowledge the privilege of being selected for this residency. We thought about the process that brought us here, from us taking the time to apply to then getting selected. In this case, ours was a success story. So our labor for application was ultimately renumerated and compensated. But all of us have applied for things and got rejected. The labor that goes into applying is invisible and it always falls on the individual artist or researcher or whatever to subsidize with their time and resources and labor, a system that just perpetuates precarity and financial instability and then ultimately rewards only a select few. So we started thinking if there was anything we could do within our limited time and resources to make the system more sustainable. The initial idea was to create a collective fund through which we could give financial support to anyone, mainly from the art world, who is trying to apply for a grant or a residency or some other form of funding. Given the temporality of our group, managing this fund would present a challenge over time. So we shifted to an event based idea, kind of a one-off gesture, where people would bring to our closing party —the residency closing party—, one rejected application, and they would get compensated for the unacknowledged time and effort they put into it.

Graeber also makes clear that sharing is not just about morality, it is also about pleasure. And this is actually how you decided to close the circle of The School of Infinite Rehearsals with the party and with this collective gathering.

Yes, integrating our collective gesture into the closing party of the residency was not a coincidence. We felt it was important to center collective joy and pleasure in whatever we do, and particularly because pleasure is often considered an individualistic pursuit and often is embedded within capitalism and consumerism, I think it is essential to decouple it from these frameworks and consider it as an inextricable part of commoning. We built community by living with joy together. This idea is even more radical when the community involves people who are traditionally excluded from access to pleasure, either because of race or gender and that is when pleasure can become political and instrumental in the process of healing and happiness.

Well, it's been a pleasure talking with you today, but before we close this discussion, I know that you are splitting your time between Athens and New York, and I am wondering what's next for you?

Well, as a first step, a few days of rest, perhaps reconnecting with nature in the next few days and weeks. But professionally, I am working on a new project right now. I am kind of in the beginnings. It is around fictions of heritage and identity that exists in different cities of the Mediterranean. I am looking into how those fictions contribute to the process of nation making by establishing sameness between people. Obviously, my starting point was Athens, but I am now part of a traveling residency around the Mediterranean. So I have become interested in bringing different cities in conversation and understand how, in each case, state power upholds certain narratives about its people in the country and they often manifest in absurdity and how these contradictions are embedded in the everyday and they can shape individual subjectivities. So, obviously this is Mediterranean based. Athens is still very much part of my locales. But yeah, I am going to be back and forth for the next year, I think, at least.

Well, I hope that we continue seeing each other at the space. It was a pleasure talking with you.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for all your questions.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.