Résumé

Making art is how I locate myself in the world. I am an artist, an academic and teacher, a policy-maker, a mother, and a humanitarian clown in training. As an immigrant artist, the sites of my production processes are in friction. The geographical location where I produce my art frequently does not reflect the socio-geographical inner landscape that my displaced body creates from within. 

I have a long history of moving among practices, disciplines, and places. I am repeatedly being pulled out of spaces that are characterized by my knowledge of the language and my familiarity with the surroundings, traditions, and social customs. This forced mobility has shaped my work, my ability to work with diverse co-producers beyond the limits of a shared language, and opened my work up to spark reflections among diverse audiences. 

As much as forced mobility has displaced me, as a practitioner it has also introduced me to a wide range of opportunities to create, and to many of the diverse forms of creative shelter humankind needs and that we can provide to each other. Being an immigrant artist has shaped my creative learning trajectory beyond the many choices I would have made for myself. 

Within my inner and outer movement, traditional conventions of art production, notions of the artist as the main actor within the making of art, and ideas about the spatial belonging of art work and art shows are subject to change. The ongoing interplay between making art and teaching, in multiple disciplinary contexts, mutually informs both my work with diverse communities, and my interaction with different materials and practices. My art work emerges out of an interplay with the multiple cultural settings in which it takes place and it always is subject to ongoing negotiation and reflection. My curiosity and social interactions direct me to various materials, just as much as the site, social and personal circumstances I am working in, do. Shifting perspectives allows for an attentiveness to and understanding of both individual and societal notions of reality and real. This is how modes of sense-making, from an ever-shifting point of view, materialize in my art. Often my work is participatory and ephemeral; time will change it and will take over the narration.

As an artist I work under the name Aimée Xenou. The French first name reflects the origin of my given name and the Greek word Xenou references the geographical location of my work at the time of adopting this name; the unoccupied Greek half of the island of Cyprus. Read across languages, Aimée Xenou translates to ‘beloved stranger’.