Georgia Sagri, Visiting Artist Lecture 2024

Georgia Sagri gives a lecture at Skowhegan talking about her artistic practice which spans painting, writing, sculpture, video and performance. Alongside her lecture, Sagri shows a series of video performances while reciting a series of essays and writing. Sagri begins her lecture by talking about her endless curiosity where performance becomes a medium of inhabitation: a breaking apart of labor, time, and the available, untouched body. Sagri is interested in the posthuman era, the mass advertised body in the service of profit making and the body’s exhaustion of well being. Sagri examines the pathological conditions of the body in the hyper capitalist era which dooms us to immune illnesses: stress, discomfort, asthma, insomnia, panic attack, anxiety, fatigue, nausea, food disorder, paranoia, mania, arthritis, depression, and addiction, just to name a few. Some of the techniques Sagri employs in her performances are breathing, movement, and voice. Sagri is interested in using these techniques to also think about how others around her can also build their own routine of self recovery, and what it looks like to create a shared practice that is open-ended. Sagri continues to speak about her exploration of the body. She first does this by looking at the Greek economy; where workers must constantly perform to retain their livelihoods, and then the digital economy; where personal branding and the performance of a curated identity are essential for social and professional success. Sagri says that the body becomes the site of production and consumption leading to continued stress and burn out. Sagri ends her lecture by stating that at its’ core, her practice is about bringing people back to form some kind of connection and trust because of all the fear and anxiety in the world. By bridging this trust, Sagri seeks to provide a soft space where the viewer can also just relax.