E Scourti

In both my practice-based research and written thesis, I reassemble personal and public media fragments to form new autobiographical documents, guided by a queer method of temporal and material collage (Freeman). Working across video, fabric, and text, my practice explores precarious subjectivity and the ambivalence of living between languages, cultures, and geographies—particularly Greece and the UK. I examine how life-writing becomes a form of resource extraction, where aspects of the self—such as my Greek heritage—are mined for value within neoliberal economies of visibility and self-branding.

Drawing from my (now dormant) Twitter archive, I interrogate autotheory in the algorithmic age. When identities are constantly profiled, fragmented, and monetised by corporate platforms, autobiography becomes less an act of self-expression than one of technological entrapment. Blending private intimacy with public persona, I position the artist-protagonist within socio-economic conditions shaped by debt, diasporic dislocation, and the imperative to perform.

Through experiments like scanning handwritten notes into digital forms, I explore interference as a mode of articulation. My work draws on Kathy Acker’s ‘third voice,’ Preciado’s shattered “I,” and Marquis Bey’s ‘unself-theory’ to trouble the idea of a coherent, ownable subjectivity. Life-writing becomes both a mode of survival and a site of refusal.

Situating my practice within the “zany” aesthetic (Ngai), I explore how affective labour and online performance collapse boundaries between selfhood, work, and play. Borrowing from Hochschild’s concept of “deep acting,” I ask whether the always-on persona of the artist-freelancer has become less a choice than a compulsion. Following Kornbluh, I consider how burnout, humour, and detachment shape the subject of too-late capitalism. My thesis proposes a biopolitical autotheory that foregrounds lived conditions—rent, queerness, mental health—as pressures that shape the performance of the self.

Student website

ericascourti.com

Supervisors

• Michael Newman
• Helena Reckitt