has lived in New York, Copenhagen, Glasgow and Berlin
before deciding she feels everywhere the same and settling back in Athens.
The thing she does constantly except breathing is listening to music.
She has applied and received a series of grants and residencies but does not own a personal computer.
She has taken part in an endless number of exhibitions, events and projects, but not if it’s on the same date as a good concert. She is not online, apart from an email account she checks, when she gets a phonecall telling her to do so.
Sometimes she doesn’t answer this call either.
She will miraculously show up at every opening of a bloodrelation artist (as she calls us) though.
She likes staring at beautiful people, melodrama and window shopping.
first entered a plane, as a baby of 3 months and thus a long phase in her life of getting sick during every landing.
She managed to control this habit, at the age of 11, on her first unaccompanied flight to Vienna, by eating pop corn non stop. She went in an English speaking Kindergarten,
a German speaking high school and her first word was giraffe. She is fascinated with quotes and dictums, but she has a very weak memory and can rarely repeat anything
unless she has written it down. The only thing she can be precise about seems to be colour.
She has spent one third of her life writing letters, then emails, now comments too, but will leave the page
blank if the title is: what is your work about.
grew up on Notara Street no 31.
He now lives on Notara Street no 37.
He is teaching drawing in an Art Academy during the day and works as a web designer for Music pop stars at night. He is slightly deaf but does not like being told so.
He is fascinated with the Image and the elementary parts of being.
left his home village on Corfu to move to Athens at an early age.
He then left Athens for Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki for Athens,
Athens for Tilburg, Tilburg for Amsterdam, and Amsterdam for Athens, where he has now settled, as if he had never moved an inch. He is co-owner of a designer company,
soon starting a branch of toys, is an expert in 3d animation and Flash, but cannot insert a table in Word.
Insists on speaking a language he calls Euroenglish- English using the grammar form of the native language
(in his case Greek). He is fascinated with border cartoon characters, the discourse of collective memory and porn.
He reads Persian poetry and answers his e-mails immediately during office hours.
is terribly afraid of flying and has never bothered with a visa.
He travels as close to the ground as possible and only when he has to,
this means all the time- he divides his time between Athens, London,
his home island Crete and the art island Hydra.
He does not find the idea of seeing new places especially interesting,
but spends a lot of energy in meticulously reconstructing scenes from Greek movies of the 60’s or soap operas and planting mythological characters in urban life context.
He has over 250 entries in his mobile phone and uses the diminutive of his first name at every official document orrepresentation.
The 5 artists are friends in myspace and facebook (4 of them) but not in life, at least not the
conventional way.
They exchange emails, comments, gifts and bites. They buy and sell each other, test their personalities compatibility and if they would make good travel pals- in fact some of them would- if they were not sick, afraid, bored, addicted to flying.
They remember how the other one looked and drew 10 years ago, but they don’t know each other's home phone numbers- or some of them would, if they had a home long enough or bothered or didn’t live in the office.
The list of facts about them that contradict each other is long- and maybe this is the one thing
they have in common.
In their life and in their work, individually and as a group, they constitute an explosive mix of contradictory endencies that threatens to selfdestruct every step of the way;
but somehow it doesn’t. They would all probably nod to that, though none of them would
describe it in the same words.
Apply Softly is about a mythological, perverted, dramatic, iconolatric, matrix version of reality.
Apply Softly is a quote, a spell and an urge. Life gets complicated:
apply softly.
grew up in a small town in the South of Italy, spent his adolescence in Switzerland, his late teens in Canada and early twenties back in Switzerland.
He decided to study Art in Italy, only to transfer to Berlin after two years. He speaks German with an Italian accent, Italian with an English one and English with a Greek. The Greek accent he acquired in Athens, where he went as an exchange student and left a grown man. He believes in the opportunity in art, the opportunity to do art, preferably in (public) space- and hiding from the police. He is a champion Tetris player and a petty thief. He met his girlfriend when he stabbed her with his cigarette in a bar.