How Aeaea Studios Began
Originally conceived as an artistic endeavour: an imaginative & speculative entity, Aeaea Studios presents the divergent expressions of Josie Alexandra’s experimental multi-disciplinary artistic-life-praxis through the Aeaea Studios.
Josie's work extends beyond the constraints of genre and is expressed through diverging and different modes of being; including conversations, the visual arts, music/sound art, poetry & essays, creative production and management, consultation and facilitation.
The Aeaea Institute blurs the boundaries between fiction, fantasy, and the real. This is reflected by the choice of words in the name.
The word ‘institute’ in The Aeaea Institute
pays tribute to the inherent multiplicity in each person.
This multiplicity is conceptualised within different cultural frameworks, for example, in psychology it is identified in Internal Family Systems; in social theory it can be seen by intra-personal relationality; and in the arts as artistic monikers or alter egos.
For Josie, the founder of The Aeaea Institute, conceptualising their multiplicity as a self-governing institute offers them a way to build acceptance and understanding within their trans, neurodiverse, and multi-mental-physical states of being.
Shifting the linguistic expressions of how a ‘self’ is conceived and expressed is at the core of imagining plausible futures.
The word ‘Aeaea’
is most commonly known as the mythical island that Circe lived on in the Odyssey. Throughout the ages, Circe, the mother of witchcraft in Greek mythology, has been reimagined in various artistic works. As an entity, Aeaea is much more than an island somewhere in The Mediterranean that Circe lived on. Depicted in Madeline Miller’s novel Circe, Aeaea is (re)claimed from a place of banishment and isolation to a home that offers safety, reclamation, and transformation in Circe’s self-expression.
Part of Josie’s ancestral lineage hails from Ithaca, Greece, where famous stories of myth-making, homeward return, and socio-political reckonings were set a millennia ago.
The word ‘Aeaea’ within the naming The Aeaea Institute situates the relevance of contemporary cultural expressions for future myth-making and socio-political reckonings.
Presented within the works of self-governing ecosystems engaging with the Digital, Virtual, & Psychical.
