TWIXTlab is a project space in Athens, situated between contemporary art, anthropology and social reality. It is engaged in social research and theory, art research and cultural production, education and social intervention. It adopts the form of a laboratory in order to propose or to support interventions in everyday life.
Since its establishment as a non-profit organization in 2015, it has organized, hosted, and participated in research projects, art events, exhibitions, screenings and discussions, and has also provided educational and training modules, workshops and seminars for the wider public, on topics within its cross-disciplinary curriculum. TWIXTlab’s activities address anyone wishing to participate without any prerequisites on background knowledge of contemporary art and/or anthropology.
twixt: shortened version of betwixt, which means in between, neither the one not the other. Social anthropologist Victor Turner used the phrase betwixt and between in order to define the intermediate out of three stages of rites of passage as ultimate transitional, subversive and creative moment of a society’s lifetime.
More info on the organizations' website, www.twixtlab.com
Project team
Yorgos Samantas (project coordinator, member of TWIXTlab,)
Yorgos Samantas is a social anthropologist with a particular interest in listening and walking as cultural practices. He is using sound, walking, mapping, photography and video as means for experimentation for the broadening of anthropological research, expression and knowledge production, and ethnographic research for the purposes of artistic production. He has conducted research in youth urban cultures, in regards to the senses, memory, and the urban experience, the environment, mental health, and contemporary art institutions, in Athens, Andros island and Manchester.
He has taken part in art events, residencies, exhibitions, and presentations in Greece and abroad, either solo or with his art group, akoo-o, and has worked as a sound engineer, sound designer and researcher in documentary films, theatre and dance performances, a scientific advisor for the radio, and for urban research art projects, an art mediator and educator for contemporary art exhibitions, and a dj.
External associates
Panayotis Panopoulos (scientific advisor, assistant professor of Anthropology of Music and Dance, University of the Aegean)
Panayotis Panopoulos research interests concern the anthropology of music, sound, senses, and performance. His ethnographic publications (in international journals, e.g. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnologie Française, and in edited volumes) concern the symbolism of sound and hearing in modern Greece, the study of local cultural associations and the role of musical performances in the symbolic construction of place. He has also conducted research on the culture of the Deaf community in Greece and he is collaborating in projects with contemporary artists. “Voice-o-graph”, a project of arts-based ethnography with visual artist Panos Charalambous, was presented at documenta 14, Athens/ Kassel in 2017. He has taught at the Democretian University of Thrace, the University of Crete and Panteion University, Athens. He has been a Research Visiting Scholar at Princeton University (2002-3, 2012) and the University of California, Berkeley (2009). He has also taught as invited lecturer at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (2012) and at the University of Cologne (2018). He is a member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the Greek Society for Acoustic Ecology.
Dana (Dimitra) Papachristou (educational coordinator, adjunct lecturer at the University of Thessaly, visiting scholar at the Institute of the Arts, California / CalArts)
Dana Papachristou is a musicologist and artist who focuses on the combination of arts through the use of new media. She has studied music (piano, clarinet, composition) at the Hellenic Conservatory, musicology at the Kapodistrian University of Athens, and Music Culture and Media in the departments of Media and Music Studies, leading to her dissertation, which looks into the “Relation of Music and Painting within Modernism Throughout the Correspondence of Schoenberg and Kandinsky.” She holds a PhD in the discipline of Philosophy of Art in regards to Deleuze and Guattari and her thesis was about “The Aesthetics of New Media Art through Capitalism and Schizophrenia: L’Anti-Oedipe and Mille Plateaux” at Paris 8 | Vincennes - Saint-Denis and the Ionian University. She has participated in interdisciplinary research projects about contemporary music and its relationship with other forms of art and in several music and geo-locative projects, and has worked as a musician in primary education. She is a founding member of Akoo.o collective. At the moment she is a lecturer in the department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries in the University of Thessaly and a visiting scholar at CalArts.
