NAIYA HOHLIDAKI

Deconstruction plays a key role in my practice, as I often allow materials and methods to shape the final concept, embracing chance and experimentation. Grounded in the socio-political realities of urban environments, my work explores how the built landscape encodes power and shapes psychological experience. I use industrial materials, particularly metal, alongside found and construction-site remnants, to evoke the tensions between sterility and decay, permanence and collapse. Through site-responsive interventions, I explore how cities shape psychological experience, inviting reflection on the fragile boundaries between reality, simulation, and power.

My making process often involves intensive physical labour, cutting, welding, assembling, and handling heavy materials. While distinct from the work of construction labourers, these embodied actions echo the gestures and repetitions found on building sites. This physical engagement becomes part of the work’s language, offering a way to connect with the infrastructures I reference, not only conceptually but through the body, rhythm, and effort.

Moments of chance and humour, found compositions and overlooked fragments that linger in the cracks of urban transformation act as generative forces in my practice, often informing the playful sculptural language in my work. These incidental details reveal traces of personal histories, spontaneous interactions, and quiet forms of resilience, perceived through my neurodivergent experience of the city. Always on the lookout for details, traces, and unexpected compositions that feed my imagination and the cityscapes of my mind. In environments where gentrification strips away histories and homogenises space, these incidental elements resist erasure. By attending to the marginal and fleeting, my practice seeks to reclaim agency within the built environment and open up alternative readings of the urban landscape, beyond systems of control and commercialisation.