Biography

Ermina Apostolaki is a scenographer and spatial artist-researcher based in Athens. Her practice unfolds at the crossroads of performance, spatial dramaturgy, and embodied fieldwork. She examines how scenographic composition triggers emotional memory and reveals sociopolitical structures embedded in everyday rituals.

Working across theatre, film, performance, and site-responsive projects, she approaches scenography as an autonomous field within the visual arts, extending beyond its conventional applied role. Sound, gesture, texture, and duration function as compositional tools, making space an experiential medium rather than a backdrop.

Her work repositions intimate, domestic gestures in public and shared environments, exploring care, gendered labour, migration, and collective belonging. Through minimal spatial interventions and performative scores, she creates situations where familiar actions can be collectively re-encountered and re-read within broader social and political frameworks.

Artistic project

Blood Can’t Be Turned Into Water is a research-based performance and installation project that reimagines domestic rituals as public, spatial acts. Focusing on the Sunday family meal, a recurring tradition in Mediterranean and Balkan cultures, the work examines how gestures of care, service, and silence have been gendered to sustain systems of obedience, emotional labour, and cultural continuity.

The project translates intimate household actions—such as setting a table, serving food, clearing dishes, and remaining silent—into performative scores staged in public and semi-public spaces. By relocating these gestures outside the private home, the work reveals the political dimension of everyday domestic labour.

The project is composed of modular “ritual episodes” structured through movement, voice, sound, and silence. A minimal and portable scenographic setup allows the work to adapt to different sites while maintaining an intimate domestic atmosphere within public space.

Format: performance / installation

Size of audience: 20-50 people 

Specific location: public and semi-public urban spaces (squares, courtyards, gardens)

Timing/duration: 60–90 minutes