Stella Ioannidou: Re-assembling Imagination(s)
Of Fragments and Fictions in Greece and Beyond
The creation of Modern Greece stands out as an archetype of the modern nation-building process. As a state and as a concept, “Greece” was established through the construction of an imagined ethnic unity, in service of capital and as a pawn in European power struggles over geopolitical control in the region.
This formation of a Eurocentric Greek identity is an ongoing sociopolitical project that has, until now, remained largely unchallenged in mainstream culture and relies on two interlocking narratives: a conception of Greece as a direct continuation of Ancient Greece and as the origin of Enlightenment —an anchor of Western thought and culture.
Amid changing conceptual, epistemological, and sociopolitical frameworks around the world, we find ourselves as a country at the critical juncture of fundamentally questioning the predominant narratives we exchange about our identity and confronting our neo-colonial relationship to the West and the EU.
What would it look like to read history with a more extensive gaze and acknowledge “the East” as a conceptual formation we are deeply entangled in, historically and culturally? What discontinuities would we identify in our current frameworks of identity and belonging?
This work tries to reassemble some of the slippages and discontinuities of our dominant imaginaries into narratives that offer new connections and possibilities of solidarity.
It also tries to explore how these fictions and political desires have been mapped and metabolized into embodied territories; how we navigate these landscapes and how we interact with fragments of imagined worlds that some-times cut sharp, and others envelop us softly.
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Noah Hurowitz: Stella, tell me about the residency in broad strokes. What was the work that you did?
Stella Ioannidou: It revolved around questioning the Eurocentric identity of modern Greece and identifying the slippages and discontinuities that exist in the everyday. That has been the overall thesis guiding my work for the past few years. The proposal that I made for Onassis AiR was submitted about a year and a half before I actually started the residency, and in the meantime I explored these questions through another art residency, “Caravan: Alexandrian Urban Imaginaries”. It was a multi-city residency between Alexandria, Marseille, and Athens (my base). During that time, I became interested in the fictions of heritage and identity within different Mediterranean cities. To some extent, I questioned the romantic idea about the Mediterranean bringing us together solely based on geography, overlooking the political relationships and inequalities in the region.
Noah Hurowitz: How do you move past – or confront – this sweeping narrative about the Mediterranean in your work?
Stella Ioannidou: It surfaces in my work when grappling with notions of identity and heritage within a place. Even if I am just focusing on Greece, the idea of Mediterranean romance is integral to our mainstream cultural narrative, but my focus isn’t to frame my work around it or work against it. I am more interested in letting all things exist equally, including the contradictions in the everyday that challenge this narrative. These contradictions often blur into the background – living within the city (and country), you intimately know and experience them without focusing on them. I want my work to bring them into sharper focus and allow all the city’s fictions to coexist.
Noah Hurowitz: The film from the Caravan Residency was developed further for Onassis AiR, and there’s a motion to it. There’s a flow as different images come into view or come into focus. What were you hoping for with this sense of motion?
Stella Ioannidou: When making any work and exploring how to articulate something, there’s some amount of agency and some amount of experimentation. In this case, the outcome was not decided at the start. I was thinking about the best way to let visual imagery communicate the complex relationship with the urban environment and layers of history. Through experimentation, I stumbled upon footage I shot in Marseille, of a romantic moment on the shore, and powerful footage I shot at the under-construction New Alexandria in Egypt. Layering the two, showing the slowness of children playing and the simultaneous movement of a sprawling construction site, gave me a language and a starting point. It was an experiment or maybe an accident. But then I started understanding more about why this worked for me. The movement provided a sense of time and urgency.
Noah Hurowitz: A sense of experience, too.
Stella Ioannidou: Yes, for sure. And that sense of experience became crucial in how the film is projected in space. I experimented with this during the Onassis AiR Open Day. Since developing this work in the previous residency, I had time to understand how it could be best communicated. Bringing the horizon to eye level and projecting it physically, rather than just on a two-dimensional screen, allows the work to be more intimately experienced. For me, this work is about that intimacy. Historical layers, landscapes, and political desires mapped onto different contexts are intimately experienced on the bodily level. It was important for me to bring this back to the way you experience the work with your body, at eye level, following the movement.
Noah Hurowitz: You have referred to your process as research and findings, and I think that’s an interesting framework to think about videography and capturing these images in your film. Tell me about how that’s developed.
Stella Ioannidou: I don’t come from a film background, so I had to find my own language within it. Sometimes I look through footage that I felt compelled to take in the moment. Other times, there are images or visuals constructed in my mind first, and then I search for the footage to bring them to life. That happened with parts of the film that I shot for Onassis AiR, like the ones from the quarries of Athens. I already had a first draft of the film, and my process became about what it needs further and what could be added to it in terms of narrative. In the text I had written for the first film, I was addressing the viewer, “you arrive at the city, you encounter the pieces etc.”. As I was in Athens in those two months, I deeply felt the presence of the city that I know best. I felt that I was missing the voice of the city and wanted to shift to the “I” perspective, speaking from the perspective of Athens. The representation of city is often limited to the Acropolis and antiquities, but less often do we think about the resources that made it. These quarries are raw, eternal, and were integral to the city, both as a resource and an economic engine.
Noah Hurowitz: How did your time at Onassis AiR help you develop your practice?
Stella Ioannidou: Part of my time was devoted to further developing the film and the narrative behind it. Another part was spent going back to Alexandria, where I participated in a symposium and gave an artist talk on the layers of heritage and belonging in my work. It gave me the opportunity to sharpen my ideas around these themes and laid the groundwork for a performance lecture I developed a few months later. Going back to Alexandria and Cairo also allowed me to record soundscapes that brought a new dimension, an experiential quality, to the film as well as reconnect with fellow artists, curators, and dear friends with whom I am still in collaboration.
