The work explores the concept of self as a co-creation of becoming and undoing, moving beyond divisions of purity and pollutant, nature and technology, sentient or material, other and human. Athene’s video installation forces the viewer to examine the difficulties of late capitalism and the “anthropocene” epoch rather than hide from them. Viewing the art through a maternal paradigm means forgoing rigid boundaries between parasite and collaborator – noting the self as permeable, complicit and vulnerable.

Nico Athene is a body of colliding personas: a multidisciplinary artist, birth doula, embodied practitioner and filmmaker. Athene;s work explores identity beyond the tradable, and the opportunities for relationship in ‘capitalist wastelands’.

She has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Centre and the Santa Fe Art Institute USA, Arteles in Finland and Anybody Dance Lab in Cape Town. She is a 2019 Sasol New Signatures Award Winner and has exhibited her work with various galleries, including Kalashnikov and Stevenson.