As To Posterity (2014)
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