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 in his last concert in Athens; a sex-worker/prostitute 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; Vasilis Papavasileiou speaking about Chekhov; an elder woman in Komotini speaks to the TV presenter she watches on screen; a young Zaphos Xagorares painting banners in the early 180s.

Eva Stefani’s documentary film constitutes an arc of fragments from unfinished stories and apparently unconnected moments captured on film during a thirty-year period. A palimpsest of meetings with people of different ethnicities, ages, and social classes, where the lives of unknown, lonely people encounter the conversations of artists and creators. This stream of consciousness weaving of images and sounds — ‘retalia’ she calls them — creates a mosaic of the here and now and the memory, of the memory and the here and now.

The work is completed by contemporary micro-stories. Its base, however, is that of unused material from the period 1995-2025, which loosely evokes Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, not as nostalgia, but as a reevaluation of who we are today.

Fragmented moments of reality, inspired by the long, participatory observation of people, from 1995 to this day. Gestures too subtle or oblique to be in official history records.

Partially autobiographical, partially from the world of yesterday and the one of today, with one foot on realism and the other on the paradoxical, this mosaic is an effort to capture the taste of dreams inside reality.