Niki Danai Chania: Pseudo-Mythical Bestiary

“Pseudo-Mythical Bestiary” is an exploration reflecting on the difficult years of Greece’s financial crisis, illustrating how monstrosity arises as a response to social inequality and despair. Shared personal experiences drawing from mental health struggles, substance abuse, and societal abandonment merge with struggles in myths and folk stories of innocent figures cursed into monsters under divine powers. A fictional world consisting of fragmented intoxicated memories, dreams, illusions, and myths is to be created starting as a narrative exploration, which will subsequently inform and manifest in sculptural pieces.

The mythical Greek animalistic monsters entangle with their modern counterparts, both victims of unjust social constructs from which escape is impossible—their stories are mixed and overlapping. Their monstrous parts are different, but their experiences are universal: oppression, injustice, despair, anger, violence, and love repeat throughout the centuries.

Returning back to the city where the initial trauma was felt and exposed is a way to approach the artistic process with affect and as an embodied experience. The visceral encounter of being in the city connects personal experiences with their sensorial underpinnings. The project will engage with the city of Athens as an organism that has been transformed into a “monster” itself. Connecting with people who went through the crisis, and sharing our personal experiences, while drawing analogies with the ancient past and the myths of monstrosity, will inform the creation of communal “monstrous” stories with Athens’ urban decay as a backdrop. The myths are re-told, changed, and alienated. In this revised order, the monsters are weary of social reality. Now it is their time to seek understanding, freedom, and equality.

Monstrosity can be located in liminal spaces, appearing in conflated areas where the subject is merging with the object, sanity with madness, desire with repulsion, life with death. Is the monster distinct from the Self or is the monster part of the Self? This potential disruption, this fear of anarchy, is what scares us in the monster but also where its potentiality to challenge the foundations of our system is located.

Employing the concept of the “monstrous” in narrations involves the enforcement of boundaries separating the normal, the rational, and the citizen from the abnormal, the irrational, the maligned, and the criminal. Infusing this concept into our personal experiences, my aim is to explore how interpretations of behaviors are weaponized to make ontological claims that actively exclude and vilify. Consequently, this endeavor fosters empathy and comprehension of what is so far constituted as “other-than-normal.”