Difficult to Find the Lost Things
New commission, Somerset House
Wall drawing with pencil colour; audio. Installed at Somerset House, a part of exibition 24/7, A WAKE-UP CALL FOR OUR NON-STOP WORLD.
Drawn by hand on the artist phone, this large scale photocopy was traced directly off digital collages made from my phone media archive, including photos of flyers, artworks, postcards and text. Layering fragmented memories, texts and information into a daydream map suggestive of reverie and absorption, the tracing has been magnified to create a large-scale drawing that has been partly coloured in. Evoking the practice of colouring-in as a meditative activity designed to combat anxiety, the scale and chaotic structure of the drawing, and the fact it remains unfinished, nevertheless suggest the impossibility of ever switching off the multiple clashing roles and distractions that precarious conditions create.
The drawing is accompanied by an improvised reading of the text on the original collage, creating a spoken piece whose randomness and broken continuity echoes the challenges of staying sane (and undistracted) within the never-ending demands on our attention. The original drawing was then lightly edited and re-formatted for publication in On Care [Ma Biblioteque, 2020, edited by Rebecca Jagoe and Sharon Kivland].
Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, born in Athens and now based in London and Athens. Embracing contingency, humour and lo-fi media, her work explores affect, work and the performance and representation of subjectivity, often reprocessing archives of everyday life in an open-ended project of collective and self-narration and consumption.
Recent solo shows include Chief Complaint at Almanac, London and Spill Sections at StudioRCA (both 2018); her work has been presented at the High Line, New York, Wellcome Collection, Kunsthalle Wien, Hayward Gallery, Munich Kunstverein, EMST Athens and South London Gallery and she has performed at the ICA, Wysing Festival and Tramway amongst many other venues. Her writing has been published in Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota Press, 2018) Fiction as Method (2017, Sternberg) Documents of Contemporary Art: Information (2016, MIT Press) amongst others. Scourti was guest editor of the Happy Hypocrite journal (2019) and was a resident at Rupert, Lithuania, in summer 2019. She is currently undertaking a practice-based AHRC-funded PhD in Goldsmiths’ Art Department.