Margarita Athanasiou: Voices

“VOICES” is an interactive video essay exploring channeling practices and their historical relationship to female agency. Margarita Athanasiou’s research on the subject began unofficially in her childhood and officially in 2019 when she travelled to Brazil with the support of the Onassis AiR Exchange Residencies program. She has since conducted extensive research on the history of spiritualism, theosophy and New Age movements and has created a database of female channelers and spirit mediums across the ages (including members of her own family). In “VOICES” she weaves in and out of these women’s lives, contextual frameworks, and belief systems to create a visual and narrative collage about agency and selfhood. Ultimately this is a coming-of-age story, about the ways we travel to find our own voice and how challenging embodying oneself can be. After completing the Onassis AiR Tailor-made Fellowship, Athanasiou will travel to ONX Studio in New York to develop the interactive aspect of “VOICES” as part of a residency program.