Effie Halivopoulou

PIXTERITY II
Concept & videography: Effie Halivopoulou
Animation & montage: Nikos Falagas
Sound design: Tim Ward
Performance: Katia Savrami

While watching endless TV broadcasts showing images of hands clad in surgical
gloves sucking the vaccine out of its bottle and into a syringe, it appears that this
ritual, shared amongst every single civilian on the planet, has become the
ultimate symbol of a glorified globalization. Through its emblematic intervention
in the human body, the ritual seems to suggest the beginning of an era that is
bound by digital trauma, with a sense of belonging (or not belonging) manifested
through connectivity, and an experience of time in an accelerated pause.
Through this observed burst of exponential technology can be seen some of the
key ingredients of the current pandemic — phenomena that have affected the
way we share time, energy, emotions, and the conflict of the real versus the
virtual. Other key ingredients are located in nature and the biotechnological
potentialities that have burdened our vocabularies with words like mutations,
transmitters and hosts, suggesting a constant “problematic” flow of matter
between humans and animals that creates biological tension, disease and
ultimately death.

The series of videos Pixterity were conceptualized during the lockdowns and
through the online Summer 2020 residency of the Faculty Resource Νetwork
(FRN) program at New York University, New York.

In Pixterity II, multiple pairs of overlapping hands, different in scale and clad in
surgical gloves, float in a natural environment of running water, pebbles,
greenery. The translucent hands, like ephemeral nymphs that are occupied in the
activity of offering care and cure, are gradually absorbed by the domineering
“color” of nature.

Effie Halivopoulou, Athens, May 2021