Marianna Christofides: exercises in becoming uncertain

Driven by a question doomed to remain largely unanswered Marianna Christofides had set to Japan in early 2020 to continue a research that started in 2018 in places long since scarred by man-made catastrophes and tectonic shifts—the inextricable connection between these forces often silenced. During her stay the pandemic broke out turning notions inside out, whilst shedding light differently to images previously cast aside. Moving with and from the material harvested throughout this time she returned to the country two years later to ‘resume’ what was left suspended. Her urge to remain attentive to forms of slow violence and the material reality of shared, depleted environments felt compelling.

Activated by encounters in fractured ecologies and bruised lifeworlds and guided by the quiet hum of energy forces that have the capacity to transform catastrophes into sources of creation and hope, Christofides pursues these questions in collaboration with artists, activists, scientists and scholars in and outside Japan. In a series of live film lecture performances she asks: in what ways can forces imparted on ever-vulnerable bodies (human and more-than-human) be rendered visible and audible, acknowledging our implicatedness in narratives of destructiveness? Drawn to those who endure, fight and create in the aftermath of disasters, often facing an uncertain future, Christofides attempts to dig into diverse embodied ecologies of knowledge in 16mm film and essayistic narrative. These emerge from practices as diverse as sustaining one's cattle and living amidst radioactive land after the Fukushima triple disaster as a life-long form of protest, or feminist ecocritical writing and poetry in support of the sufferers impaired by mercury poisoning in Minamata.

With the support of the Οnassis AiR Tailor-made Fellοwships program she will return to Αthens in spring 2023 to continue her research along a two-fold path. On the one hand she will develop a new variation of her continually evolving exploratory cinematic reading ‘exercises in becoming uncertain’, in which among others, the nuclear uncanny meets the mercurial uncanny, corporate nationalism(s) bleed into environmental injustices, and the birth of an island jibes with the destruction of an ecosystem. Furthermore she intends to extend the quests driving her research the past years in Japan to the local context of Greece by engaging with the herculean efforts of living beings to transform adversity into potential. In film, song and installations Christofides wishes to reflect on how such a wearying course becomes a survival strategy for living on in midst of abuse, violence and destructions of sorts and to allow for such micro-forms of resilience to loom large before the backdrop of a world falling to pieces.