John Sachpazis
John Sachpazis (Athens, 1996) is a visual artist based in London. They hold a BA in Photography from Middlesex University of London (2017) and this year (2020–21) they attend the MA Fine Art: Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL.
Drawing on their personal experiences as a non-binary person, Sachpazis focuses on visual and sensory explorations of concepts related to the materiality and becoming of queer bodies—such as gender, sexuality, trauma, embodied memory, affect, and fluidity. Through their art practice, they envision a post-patriarchal genderfluid world, free from toxic masculinities and heteronormal gazes. Such work aims to deconstruct normative stereotypes and stimulate re-thinking about how bodily identities are traditionally produced within so-thought "unchangeable" binaries. Sachpazis’ artworks explore the underrated notions of softness, vulnerability, sensitivity, flabbiness, and further corporeal manifestations that our society often utilises to stereotypically describe conditions of "weakness". They seek to reclaim such problematic standards and connotations through the formation of sensory media, emphasizing and revealing the real dynamics that surround these concepts.
In their current project, titled "(Un) Becoming Monster(s)", Sachpazis examines trans somatic experiences. Working between photographic processes and sculptural practices, they are producing an ongoing series of soft sculptures. After photoshooting the bodies of a diverse set of trans people in London, Sachpazis visually experimented with these images to generate the sense of a continuous skin, while printing the results on leatherette and stapling together the final sculptures. Drawing on Susan Stryker's trans theory, Sachpazis is considering these artworks as some kind of re-claimed post-Frankenstein monsters. By using the example of "monster" metaphorically while associating it with the trans body, the aim of these artworks is to enact trans visibility in Arts; which may consequently bring forth an overall basis for Trans Resistance to emerge on further socio-political levels. Moreover, Sachpazis' intention is to achieve this beyond traditional photographic practices, exploring means in which images can obtain materiality, volume and texture. In this way, the viewer is urged to engage in tangible inter- and intra-actions with the visual media, allowing for the creation of sensory conditions to emerge, through which people's phobic relation to trans subjectivities is countered and re-figured.
