Alegia Papageorgiou is a scenographer and a new media artist. She is based in Athens, Greece. She holds a BA in Interior Design (Vakalo College of Art & Design / University of Derby, UK), an MA in Scenography (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK), and she has also attended an MA in Art Science (Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, NL).
She works as a set designer, costume designer and video artist in the fields of theater, cinema, and performance. She also creates site-specific installations. Her work combines several aesthetic tools, such as video, photography, lighting installations, projection mapping, sound processing, electronic hacking, sculpture, painting, and any other technique that is necessary to support a given project.
Her artistic work focuses on the images that surround us, more specifically on their impact on our conceptions of reality and our sense of identity. She challenges not only what we see but also what we perceive as real, thus hoping to bring forth a complete re-definition of those images and of the ideas they imply.
Having grown up within the Western paradigm of what is thought of as a reasonable behaviour, she has followed those impulses that supposedly lead to “safety” and to a successful and happy life. However, it was not long until she redirected her gaze towards more playful experiments that go beyond the restrictive reasoning of the everyday. In a world full of rationality, political correctness, and anxieties driven by a never-ending quest for success and financial domination, those transient moments of “playful confusion” can be the key to the realization of the absurd as something meaningful and exciting.
Alegia uses herself, or a mirror of herself, as she chooses actions or mundane materials that become her allies in the path towards self-consciousness, creativity and wider perspectives. Roles of this kind are triggering her imagination, as she tries to find new ways of studying them and approaching them in a manner that can be challenging or even confrontational. She treats the human body (her own body) as a site for desire, imagination and submission.
For Alegia, art is a dialog created by what lies deep within ourselves (something that we might not be able to grasp or describe) and what lies around us and is external to us.
Her work experience includes her collaboration in the world premiere of Edward Bond’s “Dea” at Sutton Theatre (UK), various productions for the National Theatre of Greece, Athens Biennale, Athens & Epidaurus Festival, and Commedie de Reims (FR), as well as participation in several art exhibitions and festivals in Greece (Athens, Thessaloniki) and abroad (London, Berlin, The Netherlands, Venice Italy, Lebanon).