Rallou Panagiotou creates work where fragments of architectural landscapes, of certain anatomised commodities and formal traces of activity connected to leisure and reverie, are transformed into condensed mediated topologies.
Her work ensues as resolution of the personal, the work of memory, the eccentric conditions of the peripheral - in the form of specific materiality, architectural conditions, consumer products, the mutated misinterpreted emulations of western style- with the unifying notion of junkspace, of what is left when modernisation has run its course.
In Rallou Panagiotou’s work there is a focus on the corrupting relation of the natural with commodities and materials like eyeliner, lycra, plastic drinking straws, cement, tiles, hydraulics, looked at as essential tropes of modernity, of presenting oneself, as the essential cultural body prosthetics within ever-changing environments of luxury and leisure.
In her solo project at Dio Horia, Mykonos, entitled Lycra Proper, Rallou Panagiotou examines the bureaucracy of leisure, how the idea of holiday becomes archived or classified. Lycra becomes more of an idea than a material. Lycra swimwear of the 80’s and 90’s, products of local industry are constructed anew, specific and archetypal, with layers of industrial processes, becoming solidified memories appearing as ‘classical busts’ on drawer office units, eyeliners becoming industrial archaic artifacts. Lycra caught on cacti.