Text me when you get home, 2022
Snehta Residency
Athens
Curated by: Eleni Riga
VIDEO LINK
Taking on fear, Koczanowska creates new works utilizing technology and assimilating city’s architectural elements. Specifically, the artist wandered through areas that are considered dangerous for women in Athens and attempted to reclaim them through a series of performative actions. The result of this process is presented in a video where she uses a real-time GPS tracker application that allows her friends to follow her while making them temporarily responsible for her well-being. A red line, a sort of Ariadne’s thread, is used as a remnant of her routes, her deviations and her connections. As the artist rethinks vulnerability and resistance in the public space that was not designed to accommodate vulnerable bodies , she employs different techniques to merge into the urban fabric.
Eleni Riga
The work develops through performative walks in less touristic urban areas of Athens, perceived and described as unsafe through verbal accounts, particularly for vulnerable bodies.
Using a live GPS tracking link shared with selected participants, these areas are navigated while remote observers become temporary witnesses and holders of responsibility. The act of being on the line becomes a speculative condition, questioning whether mediated presence can produce safety.
Routes are recorded as linear traces, recalling Ariadne’s thread, while repeated movement transforms fear into spatial familiarity. Photographic documentation is reworked into collaged surfaces and translated into a wearable structure designed to blend into the urban fabric, treating invisibility as a strategy of movement and protection.