Klonaris/Thomadaki
Maria Klonaris et Katerina Thomadaki, Le Double Autoportrait Tri-X-Pan © Photo : Klonaris/Thomadaki, © ADAGP, Paris
Klonaris Maria, Thomadaki Katerina, Manifestes : 1976-2002, Paris, Paris expérimental, 2003
→Chich Cécile (ed.), Klonaris-Thomadaki, le cinéma corporel : corps sublimes, intersexe et intermédia, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006
Le Rêve d’Electra, galerie municipale Édouard-Manet, Gennevilliers, 1987
→Klonaris-Thomadaki : le cycle de l’ange : archangel matrix, Galerie Sculptures, Paris, 21 November – 21 December 1996
→Stranger than Angel / Disidentska telesa / Corps dissidents / Dissidents Bodies, The Carkarjev Dom, Ljubljana, 17 September – 3 November 2002
Greek filmmakers, artists, and theorists.
Maria Klonaris studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts in Athens, Greece, the city where Katerina Thomadaki also studied literature and philosophy. From the outset, their works included films, videos, photographs, installations, performances, sound, theory, and writing. In 1975, they moved to France, where they pursued their study of art, at the crossroads of art, theatre, film, and aesthetic theory. As of the 1970s-1980s, they made their first experimental films with a Super 8 camera, handling every phase of production in order to maintain their independence from the film industry. They actively embarked on the practice and theory of “corporeal cinema”, a key concept in their work, which they developed together, thus abolishing the sacrosanct notion of the “unique author”. The female body (and their own bodies in particular) in its relationship to images and its complete physical engagement within the creative process became a way of thinking about the central question of identity, its mythologies and representations.
From their experience in theatre, they affirmed that they had retained, among other things, “the taste for touch and the immediacy of communication, the event’s context of three-dimensional space, the accidents and risks of live performance”. Committed in the broadest sense to the promotion of the “vision of radical womanhood”, they strove to surpass the antinomy of feminine and masculine, seeking “a harmony between the traits” of the two genders. From the mid-1980s, basing their work on a photograph found by M. Klonaris in her father’s medical archives, they looked into the question of intersexuality that they associated with the Angel Cycle. Advocating the decompartmentalising of specialty fields, identities, and techniques, from their Tétralogie corporelle (1976-1979) through to the Unheimlich Cycle (1977-1979) and from the Hermaphrodites Cycle (1982-1990) to the Angel Cycle (1985-2014), M. Klonaris and K. Thomadaki invented a body of work free from the shackles of style or conventional discourse.
© Éditions des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2013
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2018
