CANDID project - collaboration
CANDID is made of Tania Batzoglou and Vanio Papadelli, two Greek female artists who met in London. In 2013 they gave a promise - to present every year a performance iteration of CANDID based on how their relationship evolves over time. CANDID has become since a performance ritual that celebrates long lasting friendships and has been presented as live performance, installation, film and multimodal writing.
CANDID is a collaborative project born out of common experiences that generated shared references but also potential seeds of competition. It unfolds as a ‘truth or dare’ game - dangerous, revealing and rewarding - that weaves the stories of two women who candidly deconstruct and reinvent themselves through movement, words, touch and metaphor.
CANDID is a collage not only of our friendship but also a palimpsest of stories by other women we’ve met, sensed, imagined, read or heard about, which keeps growing and gaining layers of complexity. The real, the mythical and the imaginary are reflected and merged, unveiling and blending memories and stories - both personal and collective.
CANDID questions friendship as it raises issues of identity, sustainability, transience and commitment, at times as a shout at times as a subtle allusion. Can female friendship be reimagined as a creative, intelligent and inquisitive practice that defies stereotypes? Can female friendship be radical?
Photos Yiannis Katsaris
CANDID at Blue Elephant Theatre 2016
Devised and Performance Tania Batzoglou & Vanio Papadelli
Set & Costume Design Moi Tran
Lighting Design/Video Yiannis Katsaris
Dramaturgical advice Mary Ann Hushlak
Trailer Music Yurek Tyndorf
CANDID 2013-today:
LONDON: GREENHOUSE CAFE performance installation
TWOFOLD platform, BIRKBECK University (London)
ImpFest (London)
THE LION AND THE UNICORN THEATRE
(GOlive-GOlab platform)London Buddhist Arts Centre
ANTIPA Gallery (London)
EILISSOS (Athens)
Blue Elephant Theatre (London)
CANDID (contemplative film by Yue Wang)
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Video by Yiannis Katsaris
'I found the closing scene extremely emotional and satisfying. The videos produced a beautiful visual canvas upon which the dialogue took an ethereal dimension' (audience member)
'...poetic...mesmerising...universal' (M.A., audience member)
'Your performance left me emotionally paralysed. I was thinking about it all night, it was so honest and so brave...and I am not even sure if brave is the right word for the way you exposed yourselves. It reminded the books of Elena Ferrante.' Emma Bennett (audience member)
'The rejection of theatrical conventions and the pair’s bold use of body language have a cathartic outcome and I ended up relating both to them and and to the discomfort their relationship caused them. Towards the end of the performance I enjoyed watching the pair spit accusations at one another, especially as this became physical, with the help of some melons and lemons. Where the narrative went astray, symbolism filled in the gaps and took centre stage.' Review by Marianna Meloni, Everything Theatre, 17 Dec 2016
Gallery
Provide a short description of the gallery, highlighting key things.
ΑΝΤΑΠΟΚΡΙΣΗ / CORRESPONDENCE by CANDID Project 2026
Biography Vanio Papadelli
Vanio Papadelli (she/her) is a Greek-born London-based interdisciplinary performance artist and performer working across physical experimental theatre, writing and choreography. Her work explores the complex realities of womanhood, friendship, childbirth and the maternal. Drawing on autobiographical material, she has created performances that reimagine women’s lived experiences into intimate, multi-layered and poetic environments of connection, reminiscence and radical care. With movement at the core of her practice, she interacts with other media including text, video, everyday objects and natural materials through a sensory approach to how feelings, textures and memories are stored and can be revealed – raw, tender, wild, vulnerable.
Her artistic process is rooted in interdisciplinarity, long-term collaborations and co-creation and focuses on the empowerment of women, queer and disabled people. Feminism, queer theory, eco-somatics, surrealism, ritual and the intersections between arts and health are major fields of interest turning my work into a palimpsest of real, remembered and felt spaces of encounter.
Her work has been showcased in Greece, the UK, Germany, Egypt, Lebanon in black box theatres, art studios, galleries, abandoned hotels, warehouses, and outdoors spaces. CANDID is a life-long duet performance ritual co-created with Tania Batzoglou and Vanio Papadelli that reflects on female friendship as it evolves over time with all its (dis)connections, queerness, stumbles and falls.
CREDITS
Concept: CANDID PROJECT (Vanio Papadelli &Tania Batzoglou) in collaboration with Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Performance for camera/text: Tania Batzoglou & Vanio Papadelli.
Video design, artistic editing: Fenia Kotsopoulou
Videography: daz disley, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Bessy Siriopoulou, Tania Batzoglou
Music (piano): Jim Andreou
Voice: Tania Batzoglou, Vanio Papadelli, Ionas Giziakis, Emil Tyndorf – Batzoglou.
This work was produced between 2025-2026.
Synopsis
“Solidarity is not a sentiment - it is responsibility”
(Rose Ferré and Marcus Reymann, Foreword on Palestine Is Ever ywhere, 2025)
"CORRESPONDENCE "/ "ΑΝΤΑΠΌΚΡΙΣΗ " (2025/2026) is a triptych film for the camera created by CANDID, a performance duet with Tania Batzoglou and Vanio Papadelli, in close collaboration with Fenia Kotsopoulou. Correspondence (Ανταπόκριση) is made of three short video poems that capture our perception of Palestinian women’s experiences during the fragile ceasefire period. Acknowledging our privileged position as observers of a genocide we have witnessed through social media and news outlets for two-and-a-half years,this film seeks to convey complex and difficult emotions - despair, grief, solidarity, and hope - through poetic texts and movement on video. Using materials such as oranges, limestone, thistles and water, in all their symbolism and materiality, it presents visual and choreographic narratives for the camera. The sound, image and movement function as extensions and echoes of one other. Spanning three locations - Lincoln, London and Itea (Greece) -, the material acts as a layered response in solidaritywith the Palestinian cause.
In the first film, two voices converse across water, imagining acts of repair through language, memory, and touch. The second film transforms the everyday labour of clearing rubble into an imaginary manual for rebuilding, where homes, bodies, and futures are reconstructed - one stone, one memory, one gesture at a time. The third opens with a child's question, "Why do the oranges cry?". It builds a dialogue with the land itself, where the orange tree becomes both witness and teacher, embodying resilience amid destruction.
Rather than documenting conflict directly, the triptych inhabits its aftermath. It asks how voices survive erasure, how landscapes carry memory, and how imagination becomes an act of resistance. Woven through the three films is a quiet insistence that care - expressed through listening, mourning, rebuilding, and dreaming - is itself a radical response to violence.
Filmography by Candid Project (Vanio and Tania)
CORRESPONDENCE 2025-26, film poem in collaboration with Fenia Kotsopoulou, UK and GREECE
CANDID 2018, art video in collaboration with Yue Wang, London 2018
Biography Tania Batzoglou
Tania Batzoglou (she/her) is an experienced actor/performer and maker as well as a drama and movement therapist whose work varies from classical theatre productions to site-specific promenade, devising, experimental performances, film and live art. She has a specific interest in physical and symbolic explorations of ancient Greek tragedy as well as devising innovative work that focuses on human relationships. While being an actor/performer, she also maintains an active profile as a performance project maker creating her own performances or commissioned by museum and other venues to deliver performative events for specific audiences [V&A, TATE, Hampton Court Palace].
Since 2013, she has been developing in collaboration with Vanio Papadelli the project CANDID, a durational performance work that every year takes a different artistic form http://www.projectcandid.co.uk
Also, she is a founding member of The Washing Machine Collective http://thewashingmachine.co.uk/ creating performances inspired by myths and current social stories.
Biography Fenia Kotsopoulou
Fenia Kotsopoulou (1981, she/her) is a neurodeviant, cross-disciplinary artist working across performance, dance, experimental image making (film and photography), and documentation as artistic process. Her practice is process driven and rhizomatic, unfolding as a porous field where different means of expression merge. Through queer and feminist lenses, she approaches the body and skin as living archives of personal and collective memory, and performance as a site of (in)tensions, deviance, ambiguity, (dis)remembering and (un)forgetting, concealing and unveiling of interconnections and interactions.
Furthermore, her work explores how memories and meaning are constructed, framed, fragmented, and reassembled, with a focus on embodiment, tactility, intimacy, and the politics of the gaze. She engages with materiality, impermanence, and entanglements, through time based and site or/and context responsive processes, aiming to challenge fixed narratives and dominant epistemologies. Co-creation and co-dreaming are central to her work as an ethical and political stance, grounded in care, deep listening, and mutual respect
Fenia’s works, as well as those of her close collaborators, have received international awards and been showcased at international festivals, exhibitions, and research platforms spanning dance, experimental performance, live art, and video art, including: Instants Vidéo Numériques et poétiques (FR), PROYECTOR Festival (SP), Athens Digital Art Festival (GR), THEERTHA Performance Platform (LK) Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka (HR), University of Cambridge – Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (UK), Venice International Performance Art Week (IT), and more.