{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.021099116781157997, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.050445103857567, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Photo/Video Language and the Feminine in Selected Works by Eugenia Raskopoulos

The experience of being outside of the language of the social sphere whilst simultaneously being inside the familial language has long haunted and inspired the work of Greek Australian artist Eugenia Raskopoulos. The artist’s work interrogates her experience of immigration through language and its displacement. Her work is at once poetic and political as this memory of languages, laid one on top of another, creates a kind of palimpsest, rich with culture and the haunting of histories. Given her position as a female in maledominated cultures, her work also leads us to question how the photographic and video surface can inflect a feminine sensibility. Does the aesthetic of the work bring the viewer closer to a feminine experience of language? A language that speaks the subject in Jacques Lacan’s sense but excludes ‘the woman’ who ‘does not exist’. Raskopoulos’ work provides a good case study to explore these ideas because she uses photo-based and video media in a tactile way—exposing the medium as fragile, ephemeral and incomplete. At its most successful, Raskopoulos’ visual art practice draws our attention to language: letters and words are written on various surfaces and given voice in multifarious ways. At times the words stifle rationality—they become mute—whilst the language of the body is noisy with its being and its longing. Nicholas Tsoutas has argued that in Raskopoulos’ work there is ‘a direct attempt to undermine and subvert [authorised] language’s capacity to exclude’. This allows a reading of her work that suggests a feminist inclination to give voice to women who have been historically silenced, but also an exploration of a feminine language, which is a more radical pursuit. Raskopoulos is primarily known for her photography and video; however, it would be misleading to categorise the work exclusively in terms of lens-based media because so often the still and/or moving image is situated as an installation within