Maria Papadimitriou

Maria Papadimitriou’s work is focused on how it feels to belong to an era and to be relational in a world of individuals. Her works draw their urgency and energy from her empathy with the circumstances and feelings of the people she meets; people whose life experiences, repressed thoughts and contradictions she can understand. Sensitive to cultural differences, social events, current change, problems of inclusion and exclusion, her works bear witness to the world as a set of different situations dictated by historical circumstances. The need for an “us” makes her engage in a sort of all-inclusive project: Papadimitriou tends to involve a huge number of people in her works and gives pride of place to the idea of being and doing together; while still owning full authorship of her works.

So, her projects paint a common sphere; the sphere of an interrelated but non standardised, common but not undifferentiated world; a humane, frugal world that feeds on social relationships, that values as much the local peculiarities, bonds, skills and materials, as the planetary connections; a hypoconsuming world but one that has a huge range of expressions, intriguing facts and moments; just the opposite of the fast, standardised and energy-consuming one that we know so well, the one that can be reproduced countless times and is inhabited by androids. Her works play with shared, far-ranging topics, such as living, dressing, hospitality, food, and end up expressing key, defining anthropological and social issues: belonging and cohabitation, pluralism, citizenship and representation, intercultural relations or our relation with our animal side; and then they sparks off ethical, political, historical, economical arguments.