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In the Wasteland exhibition (2009) I aimed to create a platform for contemplation and communication. The information I had gathered around the Greek Civil War (1944-1949) functioned like a puzzle with different components. I did not want my artwork to be like a documentary or the artwork of a political activist. I decided instead to create a fragmented screen and project images onto it reusing archive images transformed through the techniques of collage and montage.
Cut and paste technique was my main method. For the Wasteland installation I turned the gallery space into what I envisaged as a ‘theatrical machine’ so that the drama that happened in Greece sixty five years ago was able to be revealed through the projection of images onto fragmented screens . The fragmented screens were made from cut-out plastic which depicted shadows and images of machine parts, and ruins of buildings taken from historical photographs documenting the battle between British troops and the Athenian Greek Communists (Athens 1944).
The film sequences that I projected into the screens were themselves a montage of images from different historical periods: the Russian Revolution in 1917, Parisian riots in 1968, Soviet tanks storming East Berlin in 1955, and British tanks attacking the Communist Party offices in Athens in December 1944. I also constructed a red triangular space with projected portraits of communists and nationalists that were involved in the Greek Civil War. Through the action on the screen people both dead and alive were joined together.
The projectors were placed on a tower constructed out of wood which was a copy of the watchtowers used in German concentration camps and Berlin when the city was split in two during the Cold War. The combination of projections, watchtowers and cut-outs created a three dimensional collage in which I wanted to reference artworks of the Berlin and Cologne Dada movement. The moving image projected onto the fragmented screen itself became fragmented, the screen allowing a part of the image to go through and function as a metaphor for collective memory.
My installation Wasteland was a combination of both memory and space. The method of cutting, used to produce my forms, was both the scar and its wound, the amnesia and its memory as the image from the past appears and disappears through the holes of the different layers that I used to build the screen for projections. The way that I designed the installation, the choice of materials, the use of lights and shadows, the images and the cut-outs, provided the possibility to open a ‘lane of fragility’ – a metaphor for the fragility caused by traumatic situations.
‘The authentic image of the past,’ writes Walter Benjamin, ‘appears only in a flash. An image that springs up, only to be eclipsed forever in the very next moment.’ Mindful of Benjamin’s words, what can we understand from past images? In my opinion it is only possible to re-create an image from the past via the imagination. I have the feeling that the past faded in the minds of Greek people in the 1940s and society at this time was not able to recognise or confront the collective trauma of the Civil War. Consequently, this trauma was inherited by the next generation.