in conversation_Sophia Giovannitti, Avgi Saketopoulou x Rachel Ossip

08 MAY 25 Sophia Giovannitti (@sophia_giovannitti ) in conversation with practicing psychoanalyst and academic Avgi Saketopoulou (@avgolis98 ), moderated by Rachel Ossip, Deputy Editor at Triple Canopy (@triple_canopy).

In this panel moderated by Triple Canopy editor Rachel Ossip, artist and writer Sophia Giovannitti and psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou discuss themes of consent, power, and coercion through the lens of the artist’s performance Confession Prototype 1, On Having "Alot of Heart", which required audience members to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

The artist frames the NDA as a performative gesture that exposes the illusion of voluntary consent in capitalist and legal contexts, particularly where power asymmetries prevail. By invoking the language of contracts within an art setting, she draws attention to the coercive structures that shape everyday agreements—especially within the tech industry, sex work, and institutional labor.

Saketopoulou, drawing from psychoanalysis and her work on consent as inherently compromised, interprets the NDA as an invitation to relational violation, challenging normative frameworks of ethics and safety. She argues that the performance enacts a ritualized breach that destabilizes the audience’s expectation of protection and instead opens a space for risk, sabotage, and affective exposure.

Together, the conversation explores how withdrawing from the social contract can serve as both aesthetic strategy and political critique—foregrounding violation, opacity, and non-consensuality as counter-narratives to state-sanctioned violence and liberal ethics.

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Selected quote by 99 Canal’s team

“I began escorting in 2017 when I was 25 I've written about this before, how and why I began to the best of my ability to Remember, my understanding has evolved somewhat, and this is a new page, so I'll say I used to give a solely material answer, which wasn't untrue, but also wasn't honest. I was a writer, an artist. That was what I wanted to dedicate my time to, and it didn't pay me enough to live in New York. There is so much money to get, and a lot of it sits in the pockets of bored, horny men, barely professionalized. High end escorting was a practical solution. Nothing else I was qualified to do would pay my rent in two hours.”

Sophia Giovannitti

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TRANSCRIPT
recorded on 09.05.2025

Rachel Ossip Hi everyone. Thanks so much for coming back for part two. I am the character known as Rachel. I am the deputy editor at Triple Canopy, and Sophia and I have been working on the piece that she was quoting in in her performance that you all, I think hopefully all just saw for a while now, and it'll hopefully come out next month or so, in our issue called our bad which is about sabotage and Workplace Relations and ways of navigating power from different different positionalities. I guess I'm so honored and excited to be here with Sophia, who hopefully you all know, but I'll read Sofia's bio.

Sophia is an artist and author who lives in New York. Her practice is invested in earnest devotion and fucked up manipulation, what it means to be to use and be used by power. She works across mediums, including text performance, video contracts, installation. Her first book, Working Girl on Selling Art and Selling Sex, was published by verso in 2023 her most recent solo show took place at blade study in 2024 and she's presently at work on her second book. And with us, we have another character, Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst on the faculty of NYU postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She's the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia from NYU press in 2023 and the co-author with Anne Pellegrini of Gender Without Identity. She is currently working on her next book project, provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism. So thank you so much. It's just really exciting to be here with both of you.

I think I'm going to kick things off by starting where we ended the last chapter, which is by thinking a little bit about, and asking a little bit about, this gesture of the NDA. And so presumably, all of you, most of you, were at the performance earlier, and when you came in, you were asked to sign this NDA, which Sophia, then was discussing a little bit at the end of her performance. And usually NDAs are tools that are used in business or by the powerful to silence employees or gag those who have been harmed. There's a 2018 article in the Columbia Journalism Review by Michelle Dean where she refers to NDA as contracts of silence, and she traces their early foothold in the tech industry to their wider proliferation and outsize impact on journalism as a field, and particularly their relationship to sexual harassment cases. So it's really a fascinating gesture to begin a performance with an NDA, and it sets up this particular relationship that I think you were gesturing to, a bit a power dynamic between you as the performer in the audience, and but it also opens on to questions of consent, which are such a big part of Avgi’s recent work.

I would love for Avgi to speak a bit about that in a second, and think about the NDA in relationship to these frameworks of consent that are familiar to us, and also that Avgi has been kind of innovating, but first maybe Sophia, we can hear a little bit more from you reflecting on how you see the use of your NDA in that context, kind of elaborating on that?

Sophia Giovannitti Thanks everyone for coming, and thank you so much, Rachel and Avgi for being here.

Yeah, I think that for me NDA's... I can recall being asked to sign them twice, And in both occasions were in relationship to tech companies. Actually, maybe I've signed other ones, but I think that I'm really interested in them as something that is completely useful, or like useless, dependent on your positionality, basically, and like that, they're only really useful as a gag order, if the person or company asking you to sign it has a lot of money or a lot of power. And like, usually both. Because basically have to be able to, you know, afford to, heavily litigate. And I feel like that is just such an odd thing that structures......

Our lives, you know that we're kind of constantly in a techno capitalist world and just employment in general . We're kind of constantly signing contracts, agreeing to things that are sort of like a masquerade performance or whatever, of consent, but are much more a site of coercion. And so I think for me, in a two fold way, I feel like, often when I do performances or propose performances, people are sort of like "Well, are you going to, like, perform? Are you going to do something?" Because obviously, you know, I could call what I'm doing a reading. I could call it an artist talk. I could call it anything else. And I think often the NDA sort of like is, is the performance, is the kind of performative gesture that, like, really changes what's going on and... yeah, it's funny, because I feel like, when we met, and we were talking about this a little bit, and I was thinking about it, I feel when I used to do NDAs, I would announce that in a press release or in an announcement for something, and would do this sort of explanation, and I have this, like, language around it where I would be like, you know, I'm the artist, is like asking you to sign an NDA, "neutered" by her own disavowal of legal recourse as a means of justice. And I think that of recent Now, what I've been thinking about, what I was thinking about with this piece, is how, like, sometimes I say things about what I will or I won't do, and that they're like, not true. And so I don't know. Yeah, I didn't say that with this one. And I think it's also something I don't know. I think it's interesting to it's always interesting to it's always interesting to me to ask people to sign something, because I don't know that I would if I was attending a performance. So yeah, those are some of my initial thoughts.

Avgi Saketopoulou I’m very, very pleased to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really taken by the NDA in some ways. I would say that the performance starts not with the signing of the NDA, but with the announcement that there will be an NDA that you one will be asked to sign if they attend the performance. And it sets up. I think it's interesting, because it raises, as you were both saying, questions of consent. And I'll start with saying that, I think, and I'll use a phrase I write about consent, but I'll use a phrase that comes that was given to me by my my friend and colleague, co author, Mistress blunt, who is a sex worker and who, kind of, like, very succinctly, puts it as consent is a scam, and it is, much as we want to hold on to it as something that can help adjudicate ethical relationships, or can or sensibly keep us safe. But, of course, that doesn't work, but, but what I find really interesting about the NDA is that it can, like, set up a power relation right from the get go, and it is a power relation, it will be violated. Like, there's, there's, I just don't believe that nobody will talk about what happened here today. This is not to impugn anybody's ethics, but it is to say that that's the game, and that, in that sense, it's a power game. It seems to me that it's a power game where you both, like, usually the person who proposes the consent contract, because it is a contract, right? It's supposed to be the person who is in power, and then the other person gets to decide, and then power is given to them by virtue of, like, what they agreed to or what they don't agree to, or how they negotiate it. But it's interesting, because you're inviting, in some ways, it feels to me, the audience into a relationship of violation.

(Laughing)