Two Days Before I Leave – Eleftheria Panousi – Greece

A short story of light set in two different places. The places remain unknown.
One of them is mentioned as ‘home’. A back and forth narration of memories from each place. The time is defined. Two different periods; before lockdown and during the first lockdown.
The body in a room. An unknown room in an unknown place. We don’t know if the body is trapped there or by choice but it moves giving the impression that there is no real purpose in it.
It could be boredom.
A piece that verges on movement and stillness at the same time.
A piece that speaks about places but has no place.

Text, Video, Performance:
Eleftheria Panousi

Artists Statement

“I focus on the personal experience as part of the collective. I am interested in places, both real and imaginary and in the parting from them. Storytelling and diary-like narration are in the center of my work. Elements of realism and everyday routine are collected and extracted from their initial context, replaced in new non-linear alterations of reality in an effort to shift the focus area to lighter textures of the everyday; textures that slip away and fluctuate from the uncanny of the absolute realism to the dreamlike intimacy that resides in memory.”

Eleftheria Panousi is a visual artist and performer born in Athens, Greece in 1992. From 2012 to 2017 she studied Fine Arts at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. She continued her studies pursuing her Master’s degree MFA Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University of Weimar in Germany from which she graduated in 2020. During her Master studies, she designed and lead a workshop curriculum for the Bauhaus University along with her colleague Lucia Diego that aimed to approach the role of the body in public space in theory and practice. She has been participating to exhibitions and workshops since 2014 and her work has been exhibited among others at the Neues Bauhaus Museum of Weimar, Schiller Museum Weimar, Athens and Epidaurus Festival in Greece, MOMus museums Thessaloniki, Greece. The mediums that she uses vary depending on the project but the core of her practice consists mainly of videos, sound, narration and performances while she uses elements of dance, music and vocals, disciplines that she used to practice a lot already from a young age.