Dimitris Tampakis | Yield Limit

"Yield Limit” connects liminal moments in underground performance scenes and disappearing etching workshops in Athens, translating shared states of bodily risk and exposure into metal photo-etching works shaped by corrosion, unpredictability, and material breakdown.

The project studies moments when identity, self-image, and social control temporarily dissolve, allowing bodies to enter states of exposure, intensity, and emotional release. Drawing on anthropological theories of liminality, it asks how these threshold experiences can be translated into material form without reducing their intensity, and how such states might function as necessary conditions for psychological survival within a culture organized around safety, productivity, and optimization.

By connecting underground performance scenes with disappearing etching techniques, “Yield Limit” approaches risk as both a bodily and material language. In both environments, instability is not failure but a method of learning how to remain attentive within uncertainty. Athens becomes an active research field where alternative ways of living with risk emerge and where resilience is practiced through both material and bodily experience. Using photo-etching as an unstable medium, photographs of performers will be transformed into metal etchings, where chemical disruption echoes bodily exposure. Through process, light, and viewer movement, surfaces remain unstable, carrying traces of transition, vulnerability, and transformation.