Nora Okka

Nora Okka’s multidisciplinary creative practice blends the roles of architect and artist. She creates spaces, objects and images and through which architectural, theoretical and curatorial frameworks are reinterpreted.Her academic and creative research into the ancient practices and the contemporary legacies of spoliation, has resolved into a series of artworks and exhibitions that demonstrate and examine the concept of spolia as a micrographic constitution of architecture. The constitutive doubleness of her research activities generated a unique adaption of the epigraphers practice of making squeezes, a traditional method for making translation study aids. She introduces the multi-layered squeeze technique of imprinting relief sculpture, a combination of the epigraphic method and the method of non-uniform surfaces of fragments casts. By applying this technique on the reliefs of the spolia of the Little Metropolis of Athens she takes the interaction with spolia to a new level: the multilayered squeezes can be displayed; they can be viewed closely and in continually new combinations and arrangements. Her inventive multi-layered squeeze process creates direct and indexical impressions of architectural fragments from the remote past that engender a more emotional translation. In her own words “it seeks to be interpreted and experienced as a symbolic reconstitution of authentic spolia, but also as a performative continuation of the practice of spoliation”.