Stefanos Levidis: Ghost Habitats
‘Ghost Habitats’ is an ongoing spatial and visual enquiry into enduring histories of border violence at the Prespa trilateral natural park, on the borders of Greece, Albania and Northern Macedonia. The project primarily explores the use of “trail” or “trap” cameras as a filmic medium for evidencing the hauntings of state violence in the park. Through animal appearances on the trap cameras, a tool equally used by conservationists and border guards, the project considers the entanglements between nature, culture and technology in border zones, and probes the role of non-humans —animals, forest communities and changes in meteorological conditions— in bearing witness to violent, yet gradual, border processes. Accompanying the animals on the screen are 3D scans of decaying villages in the region that were formerly inhabited by ethnic minorities forced into exile, as well as fortified positions from the Greek Civil war that still exist on the mountain ridges. 3D imaging technologies here document spaces that have undergone nuanced, so called “natural” erasure, and create a digital archaeological counter-archive of the region. The on-screen material is accompanied by a collection of found objects, most prominent among which is Herbarium Besfinense, a floristic survey of the young forest that grows inside ruins of a church in one of these villages.
“Ghost Habitats” is a spatial and visual enquiry into enduring histories of border violence at the Prespa trilateral natural park, on the borders of Greece, Albania, and Northern Macedonia. The project explores the use of “trail” or “trap” cameras as a filmic medium with which to tease out the entanglements between nature, culture, and technology in border zones, and to evidence the hauntings of state violence and processes of ecological erasure in Prespa. Animal appearances activating the trap cameras probe the role of non-humans —animals, forest communities, and changes in meteorological conditions— in bearing witness to violent, yet gradual, border processes.
The project started a few years ago as part of my PhD dissertation, titled “Border Natures”. As often happens with work developed in critical academic contexts, this is an open-ended enquiry driven by curiosity and a drive to experiment with form and method, and as such it tentacles out to various directions and engages with different representational tools. I entered the Onassis AiR fellowship hoping to use the time, resources, and framework offered by the program to harness the project and wrap it into a single output – an artistic “piece”. Early on in the program, it became apparent to me that this was an overly ambitious plan. On the contrary, the more I would dig up the work that had remained idle for a couple of years, the unrulier the material appeared to me; the harder to filter into a “piece”. It had to take on several forms, and this would not be possible in the three-month duration of the Tailor-made Fellowship, which also coincided with other intensive work engagements from my part.
The fellowship, however, did help me get a clearer understanding of how the project should evolve. Having only exhibited fragments of the project in the past, the Open Day format challenged me to think of how I want the work to be presented and to design a prototype set-up for an exhibition piece. Seeing the work exhibited in space, and observing the way the audience would engage with it, allowed me to understand what components of the research work together and which ones sit uneasily next to each other or within the exhibition format more broadly. No matter how fulfilling it was to experience, this first attempt to bring different materials together seemed a bit forced to me. It was obvious the piece was saturated with information and either needed to be split into separate, smaller pieces or exhibited differently in terms of its spatial arrangement. Conversations with the audience and my cohort of fellows also yielded interesting feedback about the work itself and the way it was exhibited, but also touched on issues closer to the conceptual core of the project, related with complex ethical questions of authorship and editorial decisions when it comes to working with material produced together with more-than-human beings.
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I also used the fellowship as an opportunity to advance certain aspects of the work that I had up to that point developed only as proof-of-concept. The material from the trap cameras on the three screens was accompanied by an animation of a photogrammetric (3D scanned) model of the decaying village of Sfika/Besfina, formerly inhabited by ethnic minorities forced into exile after the Greek Civil War of 1945-1949. The animation and modelling was developed during the fellowship with the help of Georgia Skartadou, based on drone photography captured on-site with Marianna Bisti during the winter of 2019. 3D imaging technologies were here used to document a space that undergoes a process of slow yet intentional erasure, and to create a digital archaeological counter-archive of a village that, slowly but surely, is subsumed by the forest.
The Open Day was the first time I presented a physical version of “Herbarium Besfinense”, a floristic survey of the plant types that grow inside this forest that now expands over the village ruins. Assembled and pressed together with botanist Fanourios-Nikolaos Sakellarakis, the herbarium contains 33 plant taxa that were collected from inside the roofless walls of the former village church of St. Athanasius. I later wrote a text on the village and church for the catalogue of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, titled “Ghosts”. Overall, the Onassis AiR Tailor-made Fellowship motivated me to reactivate the work and, despite being still in-progress, to begin including it in presentations, lectures, and performances that form a large part of my critical spatial and educational practice.
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Moving forward, I want to keep developing the project in different forms, hopefully including an installation piece that builds on the format assembled for the Open Day, a performance lecture, and – more ambitious – a feature-length documentary film.
