Erica Scourti: Broken Bottle

Borrowing the cliched rhyming structure and themes of the pop song, Broken Bottle is a spoken-word ditty written from the artist’s iPhone notes fed into a rhyme generator and reworked into a narrative of unrequited material and emotional desires. Accompanying the lyrics and backing track, the video layers together the artist’s phone image archive, including ones sent by friends and WhatsApp groups, that correspond to, riff off or interpret the text, echoing internet memes like describing yourself through only your existing phone pics. Weaving together the personal and the collective through image archives and existing cultural forms, the video approaches heartache as both a specific experience and a well-worn cliché, with humour and playfulness. (Erica Scourti)

Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, currently based in Athens. Solo shows include Chief Complaint at Almanac, London and Spill Sections at StudioRCA (both 2018), group shows include High Line, New York, Wellcome Collection, Kunsthalle Wien, Hayward Gallery, Munich Kunstverein and EMST Athens; she is participating in the 7th Athens Biennale, opening September 2021. Her writing has been published in Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota Press, 2018) and Fiction as Method (Sternberg, 2017) amongst others, and she was guest editor of the Happy Hypocrite- Silver Bandage journal (2019). She is currently undertaking a practice-based AHRC-funded PhD in Goldsmiths’ Art Department.