Erica Scourti's 'Spill Sections' at Studio RCA explores digital and analogue self-portraiture through fragmented texts

Erica Scourti's exhibition 'Spill Sections' at Studio RCA in London from 23 February to 18 April 2018 presents a process-led investigation into self-representation. The installation features a collage of personal and corporate paperwork covering windows, creating an accidental confessional poetry that forms a textual self-portrait. Inside, prints derived from photographs of this collage are rearranged, with the video 'OTHERHEAD' (2018) reworking these images through Optical Character Recognition, producing scrambled text in Greek and English read aloud by a smartphone. Another video, 'Hot Readings' (2018), samples Scourti's videoworks from 2008 onwards, using YouTube's automatic subtitle function to generate onscreen texts that she narrates with deviations and hesitations. The artist performed the text from 'OTHERHEAD' on the opening night, blending performance with digital media. Scourti's work recalls conceptual poetry, employing systems akin to Jackson Mac Low's methods, with passages that mix human authorship and computer programs. The exhibition, programmed by the nomadic platform A—-Z, showcases her evolution through fragmented materials, emphasizing an unfinished, open-ended self.