Ancestors

INTERDISCIPLINARY ART PROJECT – SCREENING

But why should reality be coherent in the first place?

Following this logic of coherence, we apply, once more,

a notion we discovered during our daily lives in a universe

that doesn’t obey to it

Ernesto Sabato

A former wrestler in Serres eating five eggs before work; Dionysis Savvopoulos ready to go on stage for his final concert in Athens; a sex-worker watching a muted Christmas special on a broken television; E. Ch. Gonatas trimming a plant; an elder man on the phone with God; a premature newborn inside the incubator; a Georgian nurse whispering ‘Sleep’ to a patient; Vassilis Papavasileiou reflecting on Chekhov; an elderly woman in Komotini addressing the TV presenter she watches on screen; a young Zafos Xagoraris painting banners in the early 1980s.

Eva Stefani’s documentary film constitutes an arc of fragments from unfinished stories and seemingly unconnected moments captured on film during a thirty-year period. A palimpsest of encounters across ethnicities, ages, and social strata, where the lives of unknown, solitary figures intersect with the voices of artists and creators. This stream-of-consciousness weaving of image and sound – what she calls ‘retalia’ (clothing scraps) – forms a living mosaic of the present and of memory, of memory returning to inhabit the present.

The work is further enriched by contemporary micro-stories. Its base, however, is a body of previously unseen material from 1995 to 2025, subtly echoing Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday – not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a lens through which to reconsider who we are today.

These are fragmented glimpses of reality, born of long, attentive, participatory observation, from 1995 to this day. Gestures too fleeting, too oblique to register a place in official history.

Partly autobiographical, poised between the world of yesterday and that of today, with one foot in realism and the other in the paradoxical, this mosaic becomes an attempt to capture the elusive texture of dreams as they surface within reality.