Sofia Georgovassili: Baby steps
“Baby Steps” (working title) is a (inter)personal research. Through this work I try to look for something I lost since I conceived my daughter two years ago: my ability to concentrate and execute a creative task. A well-known side-effect of early motherhood is partial loss of short-term memory. For a few months, everything becomes noise and fades out, the only thing left standing in your world is your new role as a mother, absorbing everything else. All in all, it’s been a long time since I remember myself delving into a creative process; Motherhood vs Work is a hell of a battle. Over a year into this new condition, I now find myself making an effort to renegotiate this balance between being a filmmaker and a mother. In this, the Fellοwship will be of great help. It will allow me to take the space and time I need to recalibrate and sharpen my position as filmmaker. It is this very self-reflective process of re-transformation that will form the basis for the script of my next short film. This four-hands-four-eyes collaborative short will be built together with my months-old daughter, out of a series of videos she has accidentally shot through my cellphone, while my own situated experience and embodied thoughts will become a voice-over that will accompany these accidental images. Through this piece, I want to delve into my past, present, and future and turn my personal struggles into something creative and eventually helpful to other women that are going through a similar experience.
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The videos shot over a period of one year by my then 8-month-old daughter – up to the age of 20 months – still form the basis of the idea: to create a visual work from these videos, which will be in conversation with some kind of narrative. The resulting experimentalism in this material’s content – and I speak of experimentalism because, when an 8-month-old child holds a camera and records, the material is generally experimental – allows me to create a more coherent narrative around it.
As part of the Onassis AiR program, I sorted out and edited several minutes of these videos. But the work is not finished and I don’t know if it will end the way it started. This is because the project started to take a different form recently, after my conversation with Io Voulgarakis, a friend, theatre director, and mother of twins, with whom I met and shared experiences about the difficulties of motherhood on a personal level. And especially the difficulty of being a working mom in the arts, the anxieties and fears that come with it, and what happens in the unseen world of motherhood before, for example, a mom-director arrives at her rehearsals or film set. We realized that when a mother has a coordinating role in her work, then things get even more difficult. This is something no one talks about.
Based on the discussion, and the foundation that already exists with the “Baby Steps” project, we decided to join our artistic forces and find ways of approaching the material that will now emerge from both our experiences and will inevitably include new, different elements.
We are in the process of exchanging views and thoughts, and we are keeping an open and free mind regarding what may emerge from the filtering of the material once the questionnaires are completed. The form and partly the content remain also open and could be shaped into a short film, as was the original plan, but also into a documentary, a theater performance, a dance piece, even into two different kinds of performing (or non performing) arts.
