Margarita Athanasiou: The Dispossessed Daughter

During my Tailor-made Fellowship program I will be delving deeper into the research of my poetic film-essay “The dispossessed daughter”. I intend to spend two months reading, writing and working through my preliminary visual material in order to finalize the script and move into production in early 2023.

“The dispossessed daughter” is structured around a complex narrative that, on a first level, explores practices of mediumship and spirit possession and creates links between such practices and female empowerment. The often stream-of-consciousness style storytelling approach brings together facts from my own life and from those of women who were active as professional mediums/spirit lecturers during the late 19th century religious movement of Spiritualism. While the narrative evolves, possession practices shift from fact to metaphor, and ultimately this work takes on more complex themes such as trauma and dissociation, tiptoeing around the question of what does it mean to become a vessel for someone else’s voice.