Athens Sanctuary

Project Description

Athens Sanctuary is a video installation I made in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist Alisha Trimble (Aliki Pavli), who is responsible for the choreography, costuming and who also dances in it. I originated the piece and formed a production company to make Athens Sanctuary based on the Eumenides by Aeschylus and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles. Lamprini Thoma of Barricade M.I.K.E. was the co-producer. We had previously worked together on my first feature film made in Greece, No Human Is Illegal. Trimble, working with original compositions of techno music by composer Anthony P (aka Anthony Palaskas), interpreted each tragedy as a dance. These were performed by six dancers in an active marble quarry on the side of Mount Pentelikon, from which the marble to rebuild the Acropolis was taken in the 5th Century BCE. The dancers were filmed by director of photography Alexander Kakouris and Steadicam operator Vassilios Paroussis. Film editor Alexandros Kantoros then worked with me to make a montage of the dances that plays over multiple screens. The installation at Lofos Art Project in Athens includes two documentary photos in light boxes by Yorgos Vdokakis. Producers of Athens Sanctuary are Lamprini Thoma of Barricade and Richard C Ledes. Running time: 18 minutes.

Athens Sanctuary aims to be readily accessible and yet subversively to hook the viewer into a more complex reflection on the relevance of these tragedies, allowing for the emergence of a more mediated understanding of our time. The video installation Athens Sanctuary generates its power from a tension between immediacy and mediation, transparency and complexity.

Both The Eumenides and Oedipus at Colonus have to do with a non-citizen being received into the polis of Athens: in the case of Orestes, in order to find justice, and, in the case of Oedipus, in order to end years of exile and exclusion. In the first play Orestes comes to Athens fleeing the Furies who seek vengeance for the matricide he has committed and is provided a jury trial. In Oedipus at Colonus, the blind figure of Oedipus who has been guided to Athens by his daughter Antigone, after years of wandering in exile for parricide and incest, is offered sanctuary. The emphasis on the importance of respecting the humanity of the non-citizen is clearly relevant to the present time. Together the two plays raise questions of alterity and “strangeness,ˮ in so far as these qualities are an ineluctable part of the city and of each citizen.

Athens Sanctuary, by bringing together these two tragedies, underlines themes that reveal the delusional quality of total segregation and exclusion as either a collective or individual goal and, on the contrary, advocates for the necessity of acknowledging alterity as an inalienable component of our individual and collective subjectivities. Even given the radical limitations of ancient democratic Athens—the existence of slavery, and the exclusion of women and foreigners from political life, et cetera—these plays continue to generate critical thought about contemporary culture and politics. Athens Sanctuary reveals in a contemporary medium one version of their current relevance.