Skinscapes: Nefeli Papadimouli

Our psychic skin (to dream collectively)

Aslı Seven

Death unites us, life separates us. Or is it the other way around?

We are present to one another in life, in body, in consciousness – co-presence – forming alliances, families, friendships, collaborations and also animosities, strategies of mimicry and mirroring, for attack and defense.  We understand death to be the irreversible separation of the departed from these assemblies of the living, almost as if the departed were isolated in death. Maybe there is an alternative: listening to what happens in between, at the thresholds between life and death.  

Through my time engaging with Nefeli Papadimouli's work—her installations, performances, workshops, and reflections—I've come to see her practice as a reimagining of individuation. Traditionally understood as the process of distinguishing a being or an entity as distinct from others, individuation, in her hands, becomes an aesthetic, physical, and cosmological exploration. By reverse-engineering this process within specific spatio-temporal constraints, she creates fleeting moments that disrupt individuation, offering a return to a collective state—a composting of boundaries, where psyche and matter entwine, opening new horizons for collective becoming. For Nefeli, every setting—a gallery, a park, a public square, the realm of dreams, or the skin (our largest organ)—becomes a device for to capture the moment between one momentum of individuation and the next: a temporary return to indivision, the unsettling of boundaries that lift new collective horizons towards new individuations. This, I think, is the conceptual material of her artistic proposal, and it corresponds to a similar unsettling of boundaries between forms and mediums. 

At the heart of her exhibition at The Pill is Dream Coat, a series of six double-sided wearable sculptures arranged in a semi-circular formation. Initially, the pieces resemble fragments of a landscape: where sleeves meet, mountain ranges and valleys converge, painting a composition where multiple suns coexist. This landscape unsettling in that it collapses linear time: sunrise, high noon, sunset and everything in between seems to coexist in shifting tones of color between twilight hues and dawn pastels. Yet, these landscapes are interrupted by wearable forms designed for arms, legs, and torsos, bridging the human body and its surroundings. As you focus on these forms, the scene transforms into a collective ritual—a circle of dis-individuated bodies moving in harmony with the solar cycle, celebrating the cosmos and Earth's perpetual rotation.

In the background, three collective hats designed for multiple wearers hang like celestial bodies. Titled Kind of Us, these hats invoke a shared headspace where bodies converge, restrained yet transformed by their connections. These hats, mirroring the suns of Dream Coat, add primary colors to the scene, furthering the interplay between individuality and collectivity.

Behind this tableau lies Nefeli’s research into the possibility of dreaming collectively. Initially conceived as an ensemble of 10 costumes, Dream Coat has been performed so far in two locations, in France and in Taiwan, with a choreography of collective movement based on what she calls “Dreamstorming” sessions among amateur and skilled participants. Through her guidance in in workshops, the group shares recurring dreams and reflections on dreams, arriving gradually and collectively at bodily gestures, as projections of individual and collective memories, embodiments of a shared dream state. 

When I ask her about the differences in dreams in one culture and the other, she replies by stating the similarities, recurring motifs of falling, flying or being chased after, to which she adds those of climate anxiety, of natural and manmade catastrophe, emphasizing the idea that our dreams and these recurring motifs have existed before us and they will exist after us, in a metaverse that links different dream places, or a utopia of dreams where we ultimately meet and dissolve into one another. 

When activated by multiple bodies moving in space, the Dream Coat costumes transform into expanding and connecting body parts, much like wings. Nefeli refers to them as “corporeal masks” that allow us to transform ourselves into another and connect to one another. The landscape dissolves into vibrant bursts of moving color through the circular movements of performers. Similar to turning dervishes, they seem to connect the earth and the sky, waking consciousness to altered states of mind, where self and other merge.

Her Relational Cartographies, graphical notations of past performances, map the spatial relationships between bodies and environments. These works underscore her ongoing research into the ecosystems that emerge when material bodies interact with their surroundings as spatializing bodies. 

The principle of movement, and of dis-individuation applies to Nefeli’s practice as a whole: It is impossible to separate the costume from the painting, the painting from movement, the assembly from the architecture, exercise, embodiment, film, notation, study and photography. Her works are all of these things at once and move between them in a constant flux. This centrality of movement brings her work closer to life and the nature of consciousness within the cosmos.

In contemporary philosophy and anthropology aimed at understanding the nature of life, individuation is conceived as an ever incomplete process of movement. The equation of sameness and distinction is an ever changing one. What comes to define the commonality between beings and entities – humans among themselves, humans and non human beings, living and non living entities, environments - can also shift: is it our bodies while our spirituality differs, or do we share a spirit while our bodies are ontologically different? What are we made of, if not material, spiritual, organic, oneiric, chemical and semiotic relationships and connections? 

With Nefeli Papadimouli’s Skinscapes, Kinds of Us and Dream Coat, we can see ourselves not as inserted in autonomy into the world, but rather as continually coming into being within it, moving in a mesh of bodies and materialities, creating spaces and architectures of openness and protection at once, that can breathe and connect to the world, a common connective tissue out of which to grow and into which to disappear, a same psychic skin we share.