Sweat – Athens

Alice Potts

The body remains the most advanced technology at your disposal. The Onassis Stegi fills with crystalline accessories, from the sweat of athletes and dancers. Dance. Work out. Sweat. In a kitchen where your sweat becomes a crystalline accessory, in Alice Potts’ SWEAT ATHENS. An exhibit that will make you sweat.

Photo: Nick Knight

Sweat is an excretion of chemicals related to heat, passion, a reaction, a thermo regulation. A bodily fluid as yet un-examined through the eyes of Fashion or Art, Alice Potts has created an aesthetic exploration touching on the chemistry and the beauty of this entropy. She will take her Masters’ collection of crystalline accessories from dancers and athletes and present them in a curated show by Starvos Karelis in her first moment as an Onassis fellow. See her artworks, sweat in the gym, observe your sweat becoming a crystalline accessory in her kitchen/workshop, dance on the dance floor of Sweat – Athens in the Exhibition Hall of the Onassis Stegi from November 13 to 27.

“One day we will be able to grow our own accessories on our skin”. Alice stated in conversation with Sarah Mower and so Alice Potts, a recent Royal College of Art Graduate, taught by Zowie Broach, now begins her fellowship program for the Onassis Foundation. The main focus of the work will look at the confluence of Fashion, Science and the human body.During the Athens Biennale, Alice Potts will present a piece of SWEAT at the Esperia Palace hotel (Stadiou 22), a work that points toward the alternative future of design, as well as videos from her exhibition at the Onassis Stegi.The Onassis Foundation believes in human capital. It invests in people and ideas, not just projects. It focuses on the voyage and the process not just the destination. Onassis Future, the scheme that encapsulates the Onassis Foundation vision regarding education, personal and professional development, includes and goes beyond theory and academia. Personalized scholarships, fellowships, residencies, internships, are vehicles that the Foundation provides and supports in order to release the potential that all curious minds require and deserve. All the Onassis resources, networks, people and assets are at the disposal of the members of Onassis Future, locally and globally. Athens is our city. And the city the Foundation wants all Onassis people to get to explore. Alice Potts, a post graduate of the Fashion and Innovation department of the Royal College of Arts in London, will be living in Athens for a whole year, as an Onassis Fellow. As a bio-tech designer, Alice will work on the nature and the technology of the Athenian sweat.

A poetry of the human fluids, sweat as art, Alice Potts will begin to further study the human sporting anatomy, both inside and outside led naturally, by the history of Athens, the origins of the Olympian, the body full of blood, the maths of the sweat, that passion and examination of those extraordinary feats of athletic endeavor in a city, within our world, where the sporting, social and cultural high-lights all began.

"These ballet shoes are a record of the wonder of human body chemistry crystallized in sweat. The pioneering bio-tech designer Alice Potts has discovered a method of accelerating the growth of sweat crystals in a breakthrough which reveals the different qualities of each person’s being. Opening up a new frontier between aesthetics, science and biology, she is dedicating her practice in residency at the Onassis Foundation, Athens, to furthering her belief that the greatest technology humankind already owns is our own bodies". – Sarah Mower