Athens, Greece:
June 28 - July 31, 2025 Lofos Art Project. 39 Velvendou Str. Kypseli, Athens

Athens Sanctuary

Project Description / Theme / Screenings & Talk / Contact

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 Adonis Palaskas), interpreted each tragedy as a dance. These were performed by six dancers in addition to Alisha Trimble: Mirka Chalkia, Ruta Gilute, Anastasis Karachanidis, Angelos Papadopoulos, Sofia Pouchtou and Niko Rupllem. The performance of the dancers was filmed by director of photography Alexander Kakouris and Steadicam operator Vassilios Paroussis. The dancers performed 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. Film editor Alexandros Kantoros then worked with me to make a montage of the dances that plays over the tetratych. The complete credits for the cast and crew appear at the end of the video. The installation at Lofos Art Project in Athens also includes two documentary photos in light boxes by photographer Yorgos Vdokakis.

Richard C. Ledes
June 2025

The two dances of Athens Sanctuary are inspired by  the Eumenides of Aeschylus and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles. 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.

Screening & Talk

At the Lofos Art Project during the exhibition of Athens Sanctuary: Three films by Richard C. Ledes with Greek subtitles, each followed by a Q&A in English with the filmmaker, and a talk on his recent work.

Wednesday July 9th 9 pm
« Fred Won’t Move Out » (2012, 74 minutes)

Wednesday July 16th 9 pm
« The Dark Side » (2015, 51 minutes)

Monday July 21st talk in English
«I decide who is a Palestinian»

Wednesday July 23rd 9 pm
« No Human Is Illegal » (2017, 60 minutes)