video
Single channel video, color, sound, 7΄
My family from my mother’s side comes from Mylassa, in Asia Minor, the modern day turkish town of Milas on the southern shore. My grandfather and grandmother left as refugees in ’22 and found themselves initially on Samos, then Rethymno and finally in Nikea where they were given land on which to build and raise their four daughters. Nikea is where I also was born and grew up until I left at 17 to study. After my parents’ death, I came back to the paternal home where I have been living for the past three years.
In one of the difficult but unavoidable excavations of family belongings, I discovered an old icon of St. Marina. I remembered that my mother had given it to me years earlier, probably at a period when the icons of saints rated last in my interests. I inherited it solely on account of my name, as a gift from the grandmother I never knew, Marina Yahaki, who wished the icon handed down to the next Marina in the family.
I knew nothing more that that, so I started asking her daughters who are still alive, my two ninety-year-old aunts, Dina and Xeni.
Exhibitions
– Nice! A poetic exploration about the possibility of return, of memory, homeland and loss, Cultural Center Manos Loizos, Athens, Greece (curated by Y. Grigoriadis and Y. Isidorou)
– A World Not Ours, Art Space Pythagorion, Samos, Greece (curated by K. Gregos)
See also: A World Not Ours catalogue text
Video, color, sound, 12΄
“Actually the landscape was no landscape, but a particular kind of heliotypy, a kind of self destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur. I had been wandering in a moving picture that I couldn’t quite picture.”
Robert Smithson “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey”
In his seminal 1967 essay “The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” Robert Smithson, orchestrated and documented an experiment: a parody of an urban travelogue into his suburban birthplace, Passaic. Filmed over a period of 3 years, during different seasons and times of day, ‘As to Posterity’ loosely applies Smithson’s methodology not to suburban New Jersey, but to an ancient metropolis, the filmmaker’s own birthplace, Athens, through the years at the peak of the economic crisis (2011-2014). In a paradoxical way, the film also foreshadows the experience of confinement and the view of empty cities we experienced globally, during the time of the pandemic.
The film presents the results of this experiment as a collection of visual evidence from an Athens of the near future devoid of humans. Its inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind a tableau mourant of reinforced concrete, metal and plastic debris coexisting with glorious marble and the local flora and fauna. Part science fiction, part archaeological mystery, the work offers a picturesque expedition of the new Greek ruins, through an apposition of findings that serve as hints for the unknown fate of the film’s elusive protagonists: the -conspicuous by absence- Athenians.
Credits
Photography, Editing, Sound: Marina Gioti
Additional Photography: Yiannis Kanakis
Sound Mix: Stefanos Konstantinidis
Selected Festival Screenings/ Exhibitions
– What If Women Ruled the World? Women, Together, EMST-National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2023-2024)
– CRITICALARCHIVES VI: We Can’t Breathe, MEDPHOTO 5, International Photography Festival, Contemporary Art Museum of Crete, Rethymno (2024)
– No Country for Young Men, Bozar, Brussels, Belgium (2014)
– Macro Asilo Exhibition, MACRO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (2017)
– 5th Thessaloniki Biennial, Main Exhibition “Between the Pessimism of the Intellect and The Optimism of the Will”, Thessaloniki, Greece (2015)
– Wroclaw Media Art Biennial, WRO Art Centre, Wroclaw, Poland and part of the Biennial Touring Show (2015)
– Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, Tokyo Museum of Photographic Art (TOP Museum), Japan (2016)
– Depression Era, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2014) | Le Mois de la Photo, Maison Européenne de la Photographie-Central Dupon Images, Paris, France (2014) | Slought, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA (2018)
– Athens NOW, “A symposium of radical film from contemporary Greece”, screening and touring show, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK
– 10th FUSO Anual de Vídeo Arte Internacional de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal (2018)
The film is part of the permanent collection of EMST-National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens
Publications
– Reincarnation of Poetry, Marina Fokidis in conversation with Marina Gioti, Mousse Magazine, issue 58 (in print)
– NOMAS Magazine, issue no.10- ATHENS, Dec.2018 (print)
– evenmagazine.com/ii-athens-thessaloniki/
Film excerpt
Video, black and white, sound, 11΄
Greece, the early 70’s. A family visits the museum of the 1821 Greek Revolution and War against the Turks. As they wander inside the museum, one of the paintings comes to life…
‘Sabotaged’ version of a rare -found- propaganda film,produced during the Greek military junta in the 70s, supporting a largely debated fact -for many a national myth- related to the birth of the modern Greek nation and the construction of its ethnic identity.
Exhibitions (selection)
– documenta 14, Neue Galerie, Kassel
– 1st Anren Biennial, Chengdu, China (Crossroads Exhibition curated by Carol Lu Yinghua and Liu Ding)
– National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Theorimata II: On History , Athens
– State of Concept/ ASFA, aO.bC- An audiovisual diary, Athens
– Caixa Forum Mediateca, Barcelona
– Kunsthalle Athena/ Remap exhibition Athens
– Beursschouwburg, European Media Event/ VARIATION show, Brussels
– Vasiljev’s theatre, Second Moscow Dictionary of War, Moscow
Festival Screenings (selection)
– Toronto International Film Festival/ Wavelengths, Toronto
– Jeonju International Film Festival/ Stranger Than Cinema, Jeonju
– Viennale International Film Festival, Vienna
– Rencontres Internationales, Paris-Berlin-Madrid
– Onion City Film Festival – Chicago Filmmakers, Chicago
– Thessaloniki International Film Festival/ Experimental Forum, Thessaloniki
– VideoEx Festival, Zurich
– Underdox Film Festival, Munich
The film is part of the permanent collection of MOMus – Thessaloniki Museum of Contemporary Art
video, color, sound, 2΄
A Greek TV commercial from the 80s of a product-action racquet game that failed to become a success in the local market, is being manipulated anew in terms of image and sound. A subtle, comical allegory of Greece’s constant effort to be «in sync» with the rest of the world, by unsuccessfully adopting imported habits.
Music credits: Coltnoi remix of California Über Alles by the Dead Kennedys
Festival Screenings
– Transmediale, International Competition, Berlin, Germany
– Cinematexas Festival, International Competition, Austin, USA
– New York Underground Film Festival, New York, USA
– Chicago Underground Film Festival, Chicago, USA
– Boston Underground Film Festival, Boston, USA
– Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin
– Rooftop Films, New York, USA
– Hull International Short Film Festival, Hull, UK
– Hi/Lo Film Festival (US),
– Videodance Festival, Athens, Greece
– Synch Festival Lavrio, Greece
– International frauenfilmfestival, Dortmund-Köln, Germany
Exhibitions
– Herhistory exhibition, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece (curated by M. Fokidis)
– Bielefelder Kunstverein, Subjective Projections, Bielefeld, Germany (curated by K. Gregos)
About B-Alles
In her video works Marina Gioti often appropriates found footage from a wide range of subject matter and manipulates the material through minimal but decisive interventions in terms of sound or editing, in order to shift meanings and draw attention to the semantics of the images in question.
In »B-Alles« her subject matter is a Greek TV-commercial from the early 1980s which advertised trac-ball, an action racquet game that flopped commercially. The clip recalls a West coast ‘California-style’ beach atmosphere, complete with the usual carefree, fun-in-the-sun clichés. The staccato cuts and frenzied repetitions of images that are the result of an intensive re-editing process, coupled with the energetic, upbeat, accelerating tempo of the soundtrack aim to emphasize the tacky quality and amplified sense of exhilaration of the ad. Central to the work, in this respect, is Coltnoi’s musical manipulation of «California über Alles», the well known track by the seminal punk band The Dead Kennedys, which has replaced the footage’s original score. Editing and sound – in almost perfect synchronisation – work together to further underscore the naïve yet archetypal clichés that this mainstream form of advertising – a typology in itself – has come to propagate: the exaggerated atmosphere of euphoria and the myths of bodily perfection, health, youth, happiness, and beauty.
The work, however, not only draws attention to the mechanics of how these images operate but, on a second level, also intimates the global infiltration of American consumer culture, and the way it has unquestioningly been espoused as a lifestyle model, especially by countries on the so-called ‘periphery’ such as Greece. By extent, the video can also be seen as a stereotypical visualisation of how American products and trends have been implanted in our collective subconscious through the propagation of notions of desire. At the same time B-Alles invites us to reflect on the conditions that delimit or define both spectacle and spectator.
—Katerina Gregos, Subjective Projections, Bielefelder Kunstverein