Arriving at the tenth exhibition of artists hosted at the bEam arts residency programme, we are pleased to present the conversation between three very different, yet powerful visual languages. Digital multimedia, sculpture and printmaking meet in a common place approaching the concepts of change and transformation in an exhibition entitled “Alterations”, a title that attempts to embrace these concepts. The artists of this cycle have managed to create works that put viewers in the process of reflecting on the fact that the world around us is not unambiguous and static, but lies in multiple readings and transfigurations.

David Bobier is a hard of hearing and disabled media artist based in Ontario, Canada. His work focuses on the transformation of sound into a tangible pulse, using tactile vibration technologies. Through the use of digital and tactile media, he contributes to the creation of a different reading on how sound can be approached, not as something that is heard but as something that can be felt and touched. He is the founder of VibraFusionLab, a multimedia and multisensory art and creative center that is internationally at the forefront of Deaf and disability art movements. The installation he is presenting at bEam arts is the transformation of aquatic sounds from different urban waters into pulses. He uses a series of transducers encased into soft fabric cases, which vibrate to the splash of five different water bodies. Seawater, fountains and troughs reveal their pulses to the audience of the  exhibition. The audience can touch or even embrace these vibrating cases, creating a dynamic interaction between the human bodies and the underwater pulses.

Carl Folkesson is a furniture designer and artist from Stockholm, Sweden. The main axis of his work is the reuse of objects and materials that have been discarded and disposed of. Through the process of collecting the materials for his work himself, which he literally finds on the street, he explores the possibilities of their transformation. He is interested in the honesty of the materials. He dismantles them and recomposes them in new forms, always having a sensitivity regarding their original identity and origin, which is always visible in the final works. During his stay at the bΕam arts studio, he explored the urban neighborhoods of Thessaloniki, both in the center and outside it, collecting a series of “abandoned materials”. Old chairs, shelves, wall furniture, lighting fixtures, pieces of marble became his starting point for the works he presents. Three large-scale sculptures and wall-mounted installations were created after two months of daily experimentation and intense manual labor. With great care in connecting and refining his seemingly incompatible raw materials, he invites us to redefine our ideas about what is useful or beautiful. He ultimately invites us to realize that these two values can exist in seemingly unlikely places, in objects that have been deemed useless and thrown away.

Giulia Leonelli having dual origins from Italy and France while being based in Paris, she is a printmaking artist and an academic of art. She teaches printmaking at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she also carried out her doctoral thesis entitled “Entendre le pictural” which deals with the temporal understanding of a work of art by experiencing its development as space and time, the effects of rhythm and sensation as philosophical characteristics of art. Her work is very strongly characterized by flow and musicality, which is translated into delicate etching on the material of each matrix she uses. Very often she is inspired by the place in which she works and aims to express it without imitating it or attributing it metaphorically. Thus, in her current work, the starting point was the place, the waterfront at the pier of the port of Thessaloniki. The ripples of the sea were studied as a quality and formed the beginning of her work. The series of works she presents are monotypes of a plexiglass matrix, with this aquatic feeling and its various transformations, using color and the technique of chin colle. She creates multiple versions and levels, exploring the possibilities of her materials in a potentially endless game of variations.