Stefania Strouza: Under the Shadow of Erciyes

“Under the Shadow of Erciyes” focuses on the volcanic landscape of Cappadocia where Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed his 1969 film “Medea”. The project is the culmination of my research on the myth of Medea and its cultural, feminist, and environmental repercussions. In response to questions concerning environmental violence, I explore how this particular narrative embodies a geological model of thought capable of undermining human primacy. In my artistic work, Medea thus appears as a techno-physical force that reveals material entanglements between mythical places and the despoiled landscapes of the Anthropocene.

Having explored these concepts in the geographical network of the eastern Mediterranean, I will now focus on Cappadocia. In this central Anatolian region of Turkey, Pasolini unveiled, through the myth of Medea, the dualistic turmoil and the demystification of Nature that underwrites Western thought. The materiality of the landscape of Cappadocia was thus used to criticize the capitalist society in which Pasolini lived. My current focus on the region intends to bring a geological lens to the fore: a non-human perspective anchored in the study of the volcano Erciyes. In dialogue with the theoretical discourses of new materialism and environmental feminism, Erciyes will be the central “character” of my project. Through its threatening, ever-present influence on Cappadocia’s landscape, the volcano becomes a physical manifestation of the posthuman forces that animate the myth of Medea as well as a metaphor of the environment’s unpredictability in contemporary times.