28 March 2024

TO FIND THE WORDS AGAIN AND HEAR THE SILENCES

Artists

Basma Alsharif, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo, Neritan Zinxhiria

Info

Duration: 28 March 2024

screening program and talk

Curated by Marta Federici

In collaboration with 3 137

To find the words again and hear the silences is a screening program curated by Marta Federici presenting a selection of works realized over the last fifteen years by artists who use the moving image to trace non-linear trajectories through time and space, in an attempt to reconstruct personal and collective memories. The event is presented by 3 137 and hosted by Enterprise Projects at their venue in Athens, on Thursday 28 March 2024.

Starting at 7pm, the following films will be screened: Deep Sleep (2014) by Basma Alsharif; Neither on the Ground, nor in the Sky (2019) by Hera Büyüktaşcıyan; The Interpreter (2009) by Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo; and A Country of Two (2016) by Neritan Zinxhiria. The screenings will be accompanied by a talk between curator Marta Federici and filmmaker Neritan Zinxhiria, aimed at deepening the themes addressed by the program in relation to Zinxhiria’s artistic practice.

The event is part of an extended research project led by Marta Federici, developed with the support of the Italian Council program (2023), promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture with the aim of promoting Italian contemporary art in the world. The project, titled Geographies of the Selves / Geographies of the Selves, investigates the production of images and elaboration of narratives in video works and experimental films that represent shifting territories in the Mediterranean region. By questioning the role and the possibilities of artistic practices in witnessing the profound processes of change that alter the social and physical conformation of this area, the research develops a reflection on themes such as the construction of hegemonic narratives, the landscape as a sphere of elaboration of the sense of belonging, and the human capacity to represent and inhabit/navigate the space-time dimension.

The works included within To find the words again and hear the silences unfold geographies of lived experience, exploring a sense of displacement, dislocation and existence in liminal spaces and states: neither on the ground nor in the sky, neither in the past nor in the present, neither rooted nor elevated — quoting Büyüktaşcıyan’s words. Reconstructing fragmentary storytelling that alternates landscape shots, dreamlike visions, archival photos, home movies, poetic meditations, and records of a conversation that took place in a cafe, the artists’ works compose a journey that crosses different lands and seas and interweaves excerpts of private stories and public accounts. Ancient sites and ruins become resonance spaces of current living conditions, as images and words evoke scenarios of a shared contemporary socio-political history.

The title of the program takes inspiration from the remark made by “the interpreter” of the film by Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo at the end of his account, who expresses the need to go back and retrace the story once again, listening not only to what was put into words by the protagonists but also to what emerges in the gaps — in an attempt at reconstructing the facts that ultimately never turn out to be definitive. Listening again and recounting again, in a rhythm marked by repetitions that are voyages through maps and timelines, imagined reconnections, returns that are prevented, sought, forced.

This drifting in space and time is also enacted by the moving image itself, which unravels the imposed order of the plot of time and lets geographies collapse into a continuous space. The works presented propose each in their own way an investigation into the possibilities and limits of representation within the cinematic space. Basma Alsharif tests its depth and consistency, by practising bilocalisation sessions that bring distant places into one another and generate a fluctuating and visionary dimension; Hera Büyüktaşcıyan animates a clay figurine that references an ancient mosaic, to activate the apparent stillness and silence of archeological sites and archival images; Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo expose the impossibility of producing first-hand testimony in relation to life experiences that occur at the limits of what is deemed legal by migratory policies, thus questioning what reality an image can bear witness to and also what it conceals; and finally, Neritan Zinxhiria confronts the filmic narrative with the family archive, exploring the processing of the moving image as a mechanism for elaborating both memory and its failures.