Niki Danai Chania: Allilovorá
Photo: Niki Danai Chania
“Allilovorá” is an exploration reflecting on the difficult years of Greece’s financial crisis, illustrating how monstrosity arises as a response to social inequality and despair. Shared personal experiences drawing from mental health struggles, substance abuse, and societal abandonment merge with struggles in myths and folk stories of innocent figures cursed into monsters under divine powers. A fictional world consisting of fragmented intoxicated memories, dreams, illusions, and myths is to be created starting as a narrative exploration, which will subsequently inform and manifest in sculptural pieces.
The mythical Greek animalistic monsters entangle with their modern counterparts, both victims of unjust social constructs from which escape is impossible—their stories are mixed and overlapping. Their monstrous parts are different, but their experiences are universal: oppression, injustice, despair, anger, violence, and love repeat throughout the centuries.
Returning back to the city where the initial trauma was felt and exposed is a way to approach the artistic process with affect and as an embodied experience. The visceral encounter of being in the city connects personal experiences with their sensorial underpinnings. The project will engage with the city of Athens as an organism that has been transformed into a “monster” itself. Connecting with people who went through the crisis, and sharing our personal experiences, while drawing analogies with the ancient past and the myths of monstrosity, will inform the creation of communal “monstrous” stories with Athens’ urban decay as a backdrop. The myths are re-told, changed, and alienated. In this revised order, the monsters are weary of social reality. Now it is their time to seek understanding, freedom, and equality.
Monstrosity can be located in liminal spaces, appearing in conflated areas where the subject is merging with the object, sanity with madness, desire with repulsion, life with death. Is the monster distinct from the Self or is the monster part of the Self? This potential disruption, this fear of anarchy, is what scares us in the monster but also where its potentiality to challenge the foundations of our system is located.
Employing the concept of the “monstrous” in narrations involves the enforcement of boundaries separating the normal, the rational, and the citizen from the abnormal, the irrational, the maligned, and the criminal. Infusing this concept into our personal experiences, my aim is to explore how interpretations of behaviors are weaponized to make ontological claims that actively exclude and vilify. Consequently, this endeavor fosters empathy and comprehension of what is so far constituted as “other-than-normal.”
Photo: Ioanna Gerakidi
My practice begins at the point where myth meets reality and where this contact produces the monstrous. Today’s unstable social, economic, ecological, and technological conditions create new forms of what Mark Fisher described as the “weird and the eerie”. These forms often appear in contexts marked by vulnerability: substance abuse, environmental degradation, inequality, mental distress. Years ago, I started looking at such experiences through the lens of myth, as a way to cope with their intensity. Over time, this became a method of understanding and resistance. Myth allowed me to reimagine difficult realities, while opening a space in which strength and agency could be reclaimed. When the line between myth and daily life becomes less strict, figures shaped by poverty, trauma, or social pressure are no longer trapped in the roles assigned to them. When the border between the ordinary and the divine becomes less rigid, people can see themselves as active participants in history, rather than passive subjects shaped by larger systems.
This approach is rooted in my own experience of the Greek financial crisis and continues to inform my work. My method is loosely autoethnographic: I often draw from personal experiences or dreams and blend them with myth, folklore, and fiction to create new narratives that later take sculptural form. A central theme in my work is monstrosity, particularly as it emerges from social injustice. I am interested in monsters as figures that expose the pressures society imposes on bodies, minds, and communities. For me, they reveal how people are pushed into liminal states and how these states can also become spaces for reflection and rebuilding.
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
In “Allilovorá”, I continued to work closely with the experiences that first shaped my practice: mental health struggles, addiction, social abandonment, and the long-lasting effects of the financial crisis. These experiences were not merely background material but an active part of the research and of the lives of those involved. The project allowed me to revisit these themes, this time through the lens of folk stories and the forms of monstrosity embedded within them.
I began the residency with extensive research into Greek folk narratives – especially those that have not been softened: the “ugly” ones that contain references to death, violence, monstrosity, cannibalism, and possession. My research spanned a wide range of archives and collections, from Johann Georg von Hahn and A. Aggelopoulou to the works of Georgios Megas, Nikolaos Politis, and John Cuthbert Lawson. I became particularly interested in stories that originated as myths and later survived as local folk tales, such as the story of Aniliagos.
Reading these tales felt like entering a language very different from academic writing. Many are recorded in a plain, direct, oral style that gives space to raw emotion and unexpected narrative shifts. Working with them required a kind of unlearning. I explored the narrative patterns that recur throughout Greek folk storytelling and examined how these structures could be continued or subverted in my own work. The fascination I felt for such stories as a child resurfaced during this process.
Alongside this research, I began a collaborative writing project with three people who had either survived addiction-related near-death experiences or had lost someone close to them. We started writing together in a shared online document. Our notes connected their personal memories with folk stories they remembered, especially those in which themes or images felt resonant. We looked at how the “monstrous” elements in their lives could reflect and refract the monstrous figures found in the traditional tales. Two of the stories we began remain unfinished. One story, “To mprelok”, was completed two months after the residency ended. This collaborative work took place mostly outside the residency space and became one of the most meaningful parts of the entire process. A meeting where all collaborators shared their experiences from the crisis years was particularly intense and emotional. I realized that collaborative work involving trauma requires time and care, and that it can be far more demanding than individual work.
Photo: Niki Danai Chania
For the Open Days installation, I focused on one element that appeared again and again in the folk stories I had been reading: gold. Often used as a symbol of power, wealth, purity, victory, or divine favor, gold became a central material in the work. I created a sitting place, a kind of podium for the folk storyteller, but also a chest from which monsters seemed to burst forth, furious and alive. I used gold surfaces in the installation, but the monsters appeared on them as scratches, marks, and violent engravings. In this way, they claimed the material for themselves. What once symbolized purity became a surface marked by anger and survival. The lines and scratches possessed a quality that was both violent and naïve, echoing the tone of the stories. I used monsters from earlier works alongside new ones developed during the residency, allowing their stories to overlap. The installation included a soundscape composed from fragments of the stories, and it was activated through a live reading performance. Through this performance, I understood that the text alone can carry its own force, even without visual support – something I had previously overlooked in my practice, which is usually centered on sculpture.
Three months after the residency, I am still studying the material I gathered. It continues to generate new ideas and directions for future projects. “Allilovorá” remains an exploration of folk storytelling, myth, personal memory, and collective experience. Through it, I continue to examine how the monstrous can reveal the pressures of the present while also offering possibilities for understanding, connection, and new ways of imagining reality.
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Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Yorgia Karydi on a perfomative reading of Niki Danai Chania's stories
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Photo: Stephie Grape
Yorgia Karydi on a perfomative reading of Niki Danai Chania's semi-autobiographical stories during the Onassis AiR Summer Open Days 2025
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Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
The installation Allilovorá during the Onassis AiR Summer Open Days 2025
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Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
The installation Allilovorá during the Onassis AiR Summer Open Days 2025
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