Tina Stefanou

Tina Stefanou is a Greek-Australian artist living on unceded Wurundjeri country in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours: an embodied practice that she calls voice in the expanded field. As a means to seek more inclusive ways of making and to frame tangled relationships, she engages in multispecies performance with a family of local others, friends not-yet-made, and poet(h)ic meetings of matter.

Informed by diasporic experiences, Stefanou engages in sound as social practice and explores with and beyond the all-too-human and more-than-human voice. She has an ongoing relationship with a herd of elderly horses with whom she co-creates performative encounters with and is especially interested in creating alternate forms of performance and exhibition, outside of human-dominated environments.

Working with her grandmother and family, she creates living memorials to bring grief and elderhood into skilfulness, as both personal and political praxis. The artist is exploring the forces and flows that uphold and reproduce where and for whom art and welfare is experienced—exploring multi-scalar relations from planetary commons to local situated socio-economic realities of the (extra)ordinary.

Stefanou carefully pushes sonic practice and art into places that do not usually host it, finding threads that examine and affirm the diversity, absurdity and beauty of living communities and systems.

Stefanou is a Workshop leader for Hi-Viz Satellites 2022.