Coded threads: Bia Davou’s systems of emotion and embodied language

This article examines the work of Greek artist Bia Davou (1932–96) through the lens of feminist systems aesthetics, situating her practice at the intersection of materiality, code and gendered inscription. Emerging from a post-war Greek art scene marked by aesthetic resistance, Davou transitioned from painterly abstraction to a rule-based, process-oriented practice that integrated mathematical sequences, linguistic fragmentation and textile labour. Her work engages deeply with seriality and system – not as neutral structures, but as embodied, durational processes that foreground slowness, care and attention. Beginning in the 1960s, Davou’s practice evolved through the 1970s and 1980s from gestural abstraction towards increasingly structured, rule-based processes that integrate language, mathematics and textile techniques. The article traces this trajectory through key series such as Seiraikes domes ( Serial Structures ) and Istia ( Sails ), where she reimagines coding not as computation but as a slow, manual form of inscription. By stitching ancient Greek syllables into gridded fabrics, Davou transforms Homeric verse into iterative visual systems – displacing language from expression to structure. These works challenge the disembodied logic of algorithmic aesthetics, offering instead a feminist materialism where meaning emerges through repetition, tactility and embodied effort. By positioning Davou’s work within broader discourses on media theory, feminist craft and post-conceptual practice, the article argues for her relevance to contemporary debates on temporality, computation and subjectivity. Davou’s use of analogue systems offers a prescient counterpoint to digital automation, highlighting a lineage of feminist system-making that values repetition, error and tactile time. Her legacy – recently affirmed by her inclusion in international exhibitions on women and technology – demands a reconfiguration of what counts as media, conceptualism and artistic work. Ultimately, Davou’s practice offers not only a case study in feminist media history but also a methodology for thinking differently about structure: as lived, recursive and inscribed through care.