The Journey of any Interview
ambitious they say it is
I think I ask a lot
as the ideas flow in my mind,
yet my heart is absent
i cannot find clarity — cannot identify any intentions
which are my feelings
a new moon starts
and
the baggage is trying to be dissolved
i am struggling — trying to find a new
beginning
to this circle
to these words
that are about to
Unfold
29/10/2025 / 8:57 a.m. / home
It all started with a task, an assessment, to be assessed or to allow someone to see
through you. Then they’ll decide that you did (it all) right. Marina Abramovic was the first
artist I encountered that resonated with such a statement or a thought. Just because she
didn’t allow for such views or thoughts to interfere with her work. She was wilful or
resistant enough to go beyond them. And that’s power and that’s trauma.
I’m thinking of how I can work with that. I want to learn, and grow through learning, I want
for others to reflect or respond to my words, I want to improve, to be able to
communicate better. But I also want to be (like) her—fierce and untamed, unapologetic,
ready to be exposed.
So I trusted the flow, switched my focus, maybe I wasn’t ready for such an interview.
I have achieved something though: to not be afraid of exposure and therefore failure, to
be brave and have faith: something that an older version of my personality wouldn’t have
done.
1/11/2025 / 9:30 p.m. / Gateforth Street
Attending a performance on trauma and rebirth—leaving from it,
speechless.
4/11/2025 / 7:27 p.m. / home
“Dear Stefan,
[...]
I had the pleasure of attending your performance last Saturday, and I have not been able
to stop thinking about it since. I was deeply impressed by the scenography, costume
design, ceramics, and, of course, the music production. Most of all, the storytelling
continues to resonate with me, it touched my heart in a truly unique way. I am very grateful for that experience.
[...]
Warm regards,
Tami”
11:30 p.m. / home
Why did this performance shift my focus that much? Why did I feel that it challenged the
ways I look at my practice in so many powerful ways? I assume that partially it all has to
do with the role, with how they can bring together their artistic and therapeutic practice. A
deeper conversation would allow me to move deeper in and through these inquiries.
But, Stefan wasn’t available for an interview at the moment; we said we’ll schedule it at
some point in the future.
9/11/2025 / 8:57 a.m. / “unknown location”
I am thinking of my experiences.
Why am I here? Maybe this interview has to be about this or maybe not?
I have tried to follow several paths and lost my way,
yet somehow I am present and aware.
This memory of that workshop is so vivid inside my body.
When was it?
Tuesday, 21st October, the previous new moon;
its circle is now closed.
ADKerton shared with us (the Arts & Humanities’ Performing Practice’s cohort) their
practice, their knowledge, their flow. I felt a connection with them—I guess that we are
both practitioners of the field of energy, interested in the body, the soma, and its overlap
with the arts.
During the workshop, I felt that a rebirth occurred, a prenatal, prelinguistic or paralinguistic characteristic that was intertwined with transgenerational trauma was right there, standing with or next to me.
Andrew is an artist, trained as a sculptor and performer who decided to follow a different
path—a path where their performativity goes beyond exposure, beyond the stage.
Instead, they focused on collective schemes of growing and healing through workshops,
institutionally and otherwise. I wrote them an email; they responded.
9:40 a.m. / home
“Dear Tami,
Thank you for the thoughtful email and for reaching out.
It touches and inspires me to know the workshop made such a deep impression on you.
[...]
17/11/2025 / 11:00 a.m. / Store Street - Interview with ADKerton
I was feeling anxious but excited. We met in person at a cafe where everything was
supposed to be peaceful and quiet. It all of a sudden wasn’t. It was crowded and loud,
but didn’t stop us from discussing everything further.
I ask them about the mind and the heart. What are their thoughts about these two organs
of the body in relation to human movements? Currently, my artistic practice and research focus on the mind, in particular a body of work which I speak of as “studies of the brain”. That’s where my questions are coming from.
In my research, I am trying to find if there is a difference between the mind and the brain,
what are the western connotations of this dichotomisation, and how these discourses do
actually reflect on the body, when it’s static or when it’s moving, how they respond to gut
feelings and instincts.
They were there to stay with these questions with me, through their practice.
How can these themes be expressed in terms that go beyond a performing state
attached to the theatrical framework? How can they instead, reflect on or appear through other performative gestures arising from the voice, the wound, the womb, the space, whilst turning into recordings, sculptural gestures, or immersive environments?
In a way, that is what their practice was about. In a way, that’s what my practice longs for, too.
AD was a great reference regarding these alternative performative states.
To them, performative states come through collective or personal somatic movement
sessions* related to the esoteric or the unknown;
to me, they are released as artistic schemes that embody the performative as a promise and invitation to use the words of J.L. Austin, but not as an act of direct, and live exposure.
Yet, live exposure is a core part performance practices, cultivated in the present;
and I am still not able or equipped to communicate its outcome through the means
available to us, human beings.
I recall the words of the artist Alina Popa, who in one of her diaries writes: we need a
reality, off the hook and then the words of Kathy Acker, who speaks about what goes
against ordinary language in her homonymous paper.
I need to find new means, unintelligible, stubborn, wilful, persistent.
*In their workshop they talked about cellular consciousness and embryological and
phylogenetic evolutionary development and the ways these terminologies can be brought in a workshop format. When I worked with them within such a workshop’s context, they asked us to imagine or envision that cellular developments are forming, when an embryo comes to its primal life. Such a task was meant to introduce us to their approach to somatic movement and Body-Mind Centering® practice.
20/11/2025 / 5:00 p.m / Studio - Royal College of Art
These notions or ideas have been circulating around my practice for a while now. They
come to me as potential explorations or inquiries that do not only linger in space and
time, but try to become answers, or at least act as hopes towards an answer. They arise
from wounds, phrasing means or efforts to break its transgenerational circle, uttering
methodologies that will allow us to become the intercessors for others’ feelings, art
audiences or participants.
I am here, reflecting on AD’s thoughts, their journey—they found their own way of
existing in the art world. They pursued an MA centered on embodied creative practice
that has evolved otherwise, their performative was altered, became something different.
Yet, it’s still present in another form.
It seems truly inspiring that to them, the contemporary art field has to offer ways of
surviving in such contexts, instead of bringing an individual to in the centre of attention.
8:00 p.m. / home
Coming back to my own practice, both in a current state and hopefully in a post-graduate
state, this encounter allowed me to reflect on artistic decisions and processes, such as:
Why do I make recordings of abstract forms of uttering a speech?
How can I speak through breath, intestinal structures and heartbeats?
How can these forms communicate what the brain or the mind wants to express?
And it might be what some would called trauma, or the score that the body keeps to use
the words of Van Der Kolk, that is embodied, inherited, perpetuated or not), but it can also be memories or feelings of rapture and joy.
How can I bring together an artistic practice through sculpture, creative writing, educative and performance practices to encounter wellbeing otherwise?
How can I expand my research or my possible academic studies on trauma embodiment?
How can I share my knowledge as an individual, while being a student of such an
academic institution?
What is my social responsibility, in terms of providing support as an artist and wellbeing
practitioner in the health and care sector? Do I have a voice among long-standing
institutions?
How can this voice be uttered while navigating through such precarious times, where
artists and cultural practitioners are dependent on the financial support from such
institutions, which is unfortunately limited?
22/11/2025 / 3:33 p.m. / Thames River
What does it to acknowledge these all, to exist through them, make a living within such
states?
I’m also grateful to be able to release of the burden of carrying what doesn’t serve me,
anymore.
1/12/2025 / 5:10 p.m. / home
Interview with Stefan Jovanovic Kaasa.
Somehow I felt devastated, somehow I found an answer to my queries.
I came in London to become with ‘safe spaces’, to find them along with other individuals;
spaces for healing, being and existing without suppressive societal boundaries, without
the norms that can make us feel that something is wrong with us, that we are the dis-
ordered, yet we are living in a disordered system that can only make us feel this way—drain us from any pure component of our true essence, if that exists and knowing that it
shifts, constantly.
We discussed about these ‘safe spaces’—how can we take such responsibility and create something safe for others? How can we know what safety means to other people, to communities that we are not a part of, to class and gender and many more discourses
that we have never embodied and we will be able to?
Safety is unique.
Safety is connected to freedom.
I want to create spaces where people can be free—free from within?
Stefan introduced me the term ‘brave spaces’ and shared with me the “Invitation to A
Brave Space” by Micky Scottbey Jones. I was instantly attracted to that idea of a brave
environment—maybe bravery is what I need. A space where one can exist with their flaws and insecurities, recognising that this world can be overwhelming thus a real world. A space where all voices can be heard, even the most damaged ones, where “we have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.”
I imagine this space of a big, clear—well ventilated—glass box placed in the centre of a
square—not in a hostile way, but in a confident way. Where we can stand inside and just
be ourselves. Carrying our wounds but nurturing them with love and tenderness.
It requires bravery to enter a brave space but sometimes, it all just asks for an inner will
for survival, that primal need that most of us have, that need that keeps us alive.
Maybe bravery is what I need.
5/12/2025 / 10:10 pm / Trafalgar Square
Living in London. What is that feeling—that state of mind?
Does it have to do with bravery?
Is London a brave space for all immigrants, a space of freedom of speech, a space to
expand, explore and reborn from the ashes? I am walking and thinking of the multicultural and diverse faces of this city, yet I feel the vivid tradition searing under my feet. The warriors, the queens and kings of this land and their will to conquer, to move their borders, to satisfy their egos, to achieve everything no matter what cost.
Is that the connotation of identity and what does it take to erase it, even temporarily
within certain collective contexts?
I walk around, I observe—people, monuments, from all around the globe.
They don’t belong here, but they still try to, want to or have to.
Maybe I can do that too.
Every morning / St Mary’s Courtyard - Thames Path
This moment of the day—this exact, same thought will pass by my mind—why death and
life can coexist without the one celebrating the other—quite a mysterious way of thinking. I know it has to do with all the pain, with the loss and the grief that I have lived in.
I pass by a church surrounded by a cemetery, people run, walk their dogs and children
wonder around the graves, encounter in some ways the bones or what is left of others
and in the back, a kindergarten, these small colourful people are jumping on top of the
graves too, their teachers are watching them, trying to keep them in order.
I am so curious about that place, I feel its energy, do others feel it too?
In which ways?
Do they realise what resides under the earth’s surface?
In many cultures, like mine, death is celebrated, years after our beloved one is gone. The
graves are monuments of love and care, they are their new houses in a way, maybe they
act as a way to celebrate a soul, to give a soul the permission for a new beginning. Surely
the celebrations are made for the ones who stay alive mourning. I have always thought of the grave as a hostile space, a space where the body would start to decompose and I
found that disgusting, yet I would go once in a while to light a candle or leave a flower.
Here, people run on them, play on them. At first, the generational beliefs inside my brain
started yelling—that’s a blasphemy, but then all of a sudden it all switched. Life and death coexist—being the same vessel—one can go from one quality to the other without
recognising the transition.
18/12/2025 / 9:15 p.m. / London’s narrowest alley
I am at a party, in this very narrow alley, they say it is the narrowest of London, it could be.
In here everything seems so big and at the same time so small, I feel I have always been
here, yet I’ve never been here before. Somehow, my friend starts talking to me about her
new discovery about the Andean philosophy of time, which is basically the non-linear
concept of time. I am thinking of hundreds of things at the same time—one of the Reiki
symbols, the fact that I felt of being to that place before, how happy I am with myself of
being sober, previous lives, etcetera. I have always felt this holistic philosophy of time
even though growing up in Western world, I always had the perception of the connection
of time and space in a new dimension—the connection of time, nature or I would say
personal events in a cyclical or spiral way. I don’t know how this happened or where I got
it from, it just happened or I just felt it.
Like I felt it that night.
It’s time to go home.
6/1/2026 / 6:00 p.m. / Home
20 years without you.
I have just realised it’s been so long, I miss having a sister, someone to lean on, someone
to hold and feel safe, someone to have an argument and don’t be afraid of losing.
I miss laughing with you, I can’t even remember the sound of your laugh or even your
voice. I miss you being my idol, my older sister, the one that I wanted to look like.
I have been so traumatised from your loss, yet you decided to “leave” on Epiphany Day
(Greek National Holiday).
It took me years to find that epiphany, to find my purpose.
When you left I thought I had to cure cancer, I thought I had to become a doctor and do
volunteer work with children in need.
I still have that need to offer, with love and enlightenment.
I miss you. I feel you. You are my angel.
You will always be with me, in any form, name it thought or feeling,
Moth, butterfly, or heron.