Europe of Cultures - Maria Loizidou

Context

Maria Loizidou is a contemporary Cypriot artist who is well known for her sculptures, her installations, and her work in art video.

Born in 1958, she studied art at the National School of Fine Art in Lyon, France, then obtained a scholarship to study psychoanalysis in Paris with Armando Verdiglione, an Italian psychoanalyst, a disciple of Lacan. She also attended the sminars given by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault.

These studies in psychoanalysis profoundly marked her work which integrates an experimental mode, and offers a consideration of collective history, and the personal memories of men. She thinks of art as a means of resisting conservatism: "a work of art can only be considered such if it offers a new message to the world."

Maria Loizidou works extensively with textile fabrics and also notably created a series of headless sculptures. In 1988, she represented Cyprus at the Venice Biennial with the piece The Myth of Ariane in three acts. She currently lives and works in Nicosia.

Valérie Dhiver

Transcription

(Music)

Maria Loizidou

(Greek) Everyone is around us, something which to me proves that there also exists a third conviction.

(Music)

Maria Loizidou

That it is not one person who creates a work of art, it's all the people around them and the artist is just a means for this to come out. (Greek) All the people who have an active role in convincing the artist to make something... (Greek) also those who will look at it and meet it. (Greek) I worry about war, I worry about the suffering of man, I worry about the coming confrontation, (Greek) Because yes, it's the memories and to a degree my guilt, because I am a mother. (Greek) I feel guilty that I've created a child who is growing up in a part of the world that at this point, is a border between Europe and the East.

(Music)

Maria Loizidou

I believe that the role of art is to overturn the status quo.

(Music)

Maria Loizidou

I had the luck to finish my studies in France in the 1980s when psychoanalysis was predominant. Now, it's less so because either way, the humanistic field which was France's trump card, with the current crisis France is going through, I think it's lost its interest. (Greek) I had the luck to live those nice years, which greatly strengthens this relationship with psychoanalysis. (Greek) And gaining a scholarship for Paris, I had the great luck to become attached to the psychoanalytic school of the Italian Armando Verdiglione who is Lacan's student, and to have a long-standing relationship with psychoanalysis. (Greek) I was greatly impressed by this all Cartesian relationship of the French, the enquiry, and I believe that as an individual, in my own idiosyncrasy, it was a method which I felt would help me to get to know myself better and to better handle my relationships with others. (Greek) I think it is the most important training I had in my life, much more serious that my studies at the school of fine arts.

(Music)

Maria Loizidou

I don't like to provoke, I prefer to keep this energy for my personal dealings with things I disagree about. I am not provocative in the presentation of my work, it depends of course on the dynamics of the relationship I find myself in.