Residency: Lito Kattou

Lito’s Kattou works negotiate understandings of materiality and subjectivity through a composition of practices, spanning from digital fabrication to thermochemical elaborations. Articulated as weapons, skins, or cosmic elements, Kattou’s works engage with the sculptural potentiality of flatness, processes of embodiment and the transfigurations of material properties within the margins of space and time. Her practice talks about what comes before and after the body, the possibility of its presence and absence, its representation and its abstraction. Subjectivation in Kattou’s work is understood as a series of tactics for the production and the conditioning of the self and the other. The subject is presented as a wanderer, transcending identity and categorisation: a composition of voices shifting equivocally between dialogue and monologue. Space, form and narrative is structured around traces left from acts of attack and defence, modes of roaming and intimate communication. 

www.litokattou.com

Lito Kattou (*1990 in Nicosia, Cyprus) lives and works in Athens. She is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Royal College of Art in London with an MA in Sculpture.  Kattou is the recipient of the New Positions Award for Art Cologne 2018 and she was the invited artist for the 89plus Google Residency curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, 2017.  She has presented her work in solo shows at Deste Foundation, Benaki Museum, Athens; ROOM E10 27, Berlin; Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia; Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens; Clearview.ltd, London; Pierre Poumet, Bordeaux and participated in various group shows including “District 17” Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Gallery, Berlin; “And if I left of dreaming about you?” Foothold, Bari; “The Equilibrists”, New Museum, NY in collaboration with DESTE Foundation, Benaki Museum, Athens. 

During the residency Kattou focused and researched physically but also through written stories and folk iterations, the fauna and flora of the island aiming to understand the relationship of the physical environment to the volcanic geology, the crater and the local inhabitants. She started designing the work “Evening Swarm” which developed as a swarm of animal shaped kites and was performed in the volcano crater Stefanos for Making Oddkin in September. The swarm of flying creatures consisted of hawks, doves, eagles, octopuses and dragons which embody the spirits of entities that have passed by the volcanic landscape or might find their way there in the future as visitors, climatic migrants or settlers. Their names carried on their wings and bodies reveal their uncanny or familiar origins. 

The project is realized with the support of the City of Prague and Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.