Yorgia Karidi

Yorgia Karidi, is an Athenian visual artist, musician, dj and performer, whose works / ‘live sets’ focus on listening, vocal qualities and inter-media, cross-genre compositions. She works with painting, sculpture, video, performance, sound and verbal scores. She has worked extensively with the human voice in performance with the desire to understand the historical, political and cultural context of the existence of a femininity in the world.

Bonding with the community she belongs in, collaborating with artists and musicians and the poetry in simple acts and gestures is the axis of her work. Her latest practice/research, uses the symbol phrase Free Things and is devoted to empowering creativity and the rare liberating elements in today’s life. Published work among others on labels: Nutty Wombat, Inner Ear Records, Orila Records, Ecstatic, Bokeh Versions.

The performance score “Seven Songs”, is a verbal score (notated with words instead of notes) that describes a performance piece with alternating content that can be performed from one person to a chorus. Are song lyrics poems? How easily does a pop song, a folk song shape a person’s life? A song can stay with us for years. Perhaps we do not understand a word, it is in another language, or we catch only one word, but – from the very first hearing – with our mind and psyche we have already completed the meaning. The performance as an acoustic walk or as individual acoustic installations presents seven musical compositions with lyrics, which change each time according to the location and the persons involved. The goal is to say or hear a song, familiar as never heard before because it is connected to the way, the faces and the moment. We thus place a familiar or less familiar piece in its place to become an open shell that will bring the possibility of creating potential memories by marking time.

The piece ” The rock is also an ear ” is a sound performance for a standing / walking audience, created for the quarry of Agios Eleftherios in Pyrgos, Tinos, using field recordings, a pa system and two different graphic scores created in May 2023. Score one is created by Miriam Isasi and a version is carved from one of the quarry’ s marble volumes and is a piece that symbolizes the echoing of long gone sounds of marble workers traveling over the village. The other one created by Yorgia Karidi is a piece looking at sound as a complex multilayer woven piece made with a plethora of recordings that happened on Karidi’s field research of the island’s human voices and meterial’s resonance. When hit with an iron tool, marble has a tone that reveals its composition and density. When worked the marble reveals multilayered parts of material that formed within an inherited earth capturing the landscape’s history among its ‘waters’. Karidi’s work comments on that analogy and interacts with Isasi under the idea of strength and vulnerability, one of the most interesting dipoles for referring to the human condition.