Patricia Kolaiti was born in Athens and grew up in the island of Aegina. She has published the poetry books 'Celesteia' (Nefeli Publishings, 2007, nominated for the 2008 Diavazo First Book Award), 'The Lithopedion' (Nefeli Publishings, 2016) and 'The Return' (FRMK Publishings, 2017). Patricia's poems have been translated in English, Italian, Boulgarian and Dutch and appear in various literary journals, anthologies and online literary platforms. Her artistic work systematically explores the interface between poetry and performance art/ voice and corporeality, attempting experimental presentations of her poems as performances, interactive readings and somatic events. As a poet and performer, she has been invited to participate in a range of interdisciplinary arts projects (Experimental solo performance 'Persephone 's portrait or the Dilemma', the 'Symptom Projects', Amfissa 2017; 'Petra: poetry on stage', an experimental solo performance in collaboration with the poet and performer Dimitris Leontzakos, 14th International Thessaloniki Book Festival 2017; 'AIGAI_W', Angeliki Hatzimichali Museum, Athens 2015 ;'Raul Zurita's 'INPI': a polyphonic recitation', journal FRMK & Polis Art Café, Athens 2014;'Tettix', Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens 2013; 'Ithaka: a live poetry installation', The University of New York, Ithaka 2013; 'The 2nd Athens Prostibulo Poetico', Ebros Theatre, Athens 2013;'The 1st Athens Prostibulo Poetico', Dasein, Athens 2011; 'In Arcadia ego', Athens Biennale 2009; 'Karaoke Poetry Bar', Athens Biennale 2007 κ.α.), while also presenting her work in poetry readings and literary festivals.
Patricia is also an emerging philosopher of literature and art. She took doctorate studies at University College London (UCL) and has worked as a lecturer and researcher at UCL, University of Middlesex and NYC, Athens. In 2011 she became associate researcher in the interdisciplinary research project 'Literature as a Cognitive Object' based at St. John's College, Oxford (2011-2014) and is a co-founder of the international and interdisciplinary 'Beyond Meaning Network'. Her theoretical work –for which she has received a number of scholarships and awards in Greece and the UK- develops a novel, cognitive account of the nature of literature and art. Her first theoretical book 'The Limits of Expression; Language, Literature, Mind' is currently under consideration by a leading UK publisher.

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I don't consider it at all self evident that reality is visible. Reality is anything but given. I am interested in art/ poetry as an exercise in vision, as an act of excavation, as an intellectual attitude that retrieves reality from obscurity.

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There is a kind of experiential and psycho-emotive galvanizing of a receiver (who on such occasions is “being moved” as distinguished from merely “emoting”) which film, theater and occasionally the novel, certainly do well. A targetted widening of the poetic event into such effects is one of the stakes in my investigation of poetry.

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I am trying to evade language. I wish to denude the poem. Until language remains as something indifferent or minimal.

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Recently, I have become interested in the work of art / the poem as something not completed. I am intrigued by the idea of an epistemologically riddled construct, a work whose aesthetic and artistic function requires that it is not completed as information. With the primary material of my poetry always so far traceable to reality, the epistemologically riddled poetic construct is a conception that instigates – such, at least, is my wish – an infinite regression, an endless circular loop from the Work to the World (for where else might the missing bits be?) and back to the Work and back to the World, ad infinitum.

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I’ll play my bet on a conceptual variety of poetry and a ‘poetry of the literal’.

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Poetry above all. No! Life above all.

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The ultimate creative act is to be able indeed to Exist.

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My performative research of the past few years explores the interaction between the corporeal origin / materiality of the voice and bodily action as kinetic form. Focusing both on the poem itself and on the poetic delivery as a corporeal and kinetic circumstance, I construct kinetic forms, whether static or dynamic, which I perform myself in combination with a wide repertoire of ways of vocally performing/delivering the poem. The outcome of this process, which I would call corporealization enjoins poetic delivery with elements of corporeal theater but also of sculpture (as when, in static kinetic froms, the delivery is emitted by a speaking sculpture, as it were), it transforms my physical presence as a poet from a reading agency to an embodiment of the speaking voice, while it simultaneously it emmeshes the writing subject, the narrative voice and the speaking or acting persona into one indissoluble unity. Through corporealization, my characters are enlivened, they emerge from the paper and are made in-carnate by the very poetic consciousness which created them: they become flesh and blood, by flesh and my blood.