Performance With Vanio Papdelli
SQUEEZE
Performance by Vanio Papadelli and Esther Sabetpour
September 13th
We are two interdisciplinary arts and health and Facilitators working at the intersection of movement, photography, and writing. Through collaboration we explore togetherness and separation, motherhood and city life, creating living sculptures that invite audiences into moments of vulnerability and connection.
We appeared and disappeared through an office windowpane — forehead, wrist, ankle pressed to the glass. Smearing, rubbing, flattening against the cold surface. Out of sync: reaching, falling. Then entering a dark, fabric-like space — hidden, stretching heavy. Inside, the cloth enveloped us, cocoon-like, reshaping our bodies into shifting contours. It became a living sculpture — swelling, collapsing, a womb of moving matter that held and released us in turns.
Fibres pulled from us — tentacles, threads, intestines. Entangled, tied together, separating. We met each other’s gaze through hand-held mirrors, then turned them outward, reflecting the audience back to themselves.
From the squeeze of life — the pressures of city, time, and motherhood — we traced vulnerability through intuitive improvisation. The body birthed abstract sculptures, asemic writing, and layered soundscapes in Greek and English. At times womb-like, at times ruptured, the piece carried both the intimacy and the weight of mothering — its isolations, entanglements, and deep connections.
As two interdisciplinary artists working at the intersection of movement, writing, photography, and well-being, we fuse our practices to explore togetherness, separation, and the thresholds between inner and outer worlds.
We invited the audience to join us — not only through photography but also through writing. They stepped into the performance by closely photographing us with a shared camera, reflecting our gaze back to us through mirrors, and offering their own words alongside our asemic marks.
Audio and spoken word by Vanio Papadelli
