Yiannis Theodoropoulos: "Antioch", 2013

'Reading Sonia Ilinskaya's introduction to the complete works of Cavafy, I focused on her insights regarding the issue of collective consciousness and crowd psychology, a subject that Cavafy was already addressing in his early work: from indifference ("Alexandrian Kings", 1912), to blind, fanatical aggression (in the Julian cycle and especially in the poem "In the Outskirts of Antioch", 1933).

The prophetic nature of this trope in Cavafy's historical example was confirmed by the course of history in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the "opening acts" of this course, the burning of the Reichstag, occurred just at the time that Cavafy, in his poem "In the Outskirts of Antioch", was describing how the Antiochenes, in the context of their conflict with Julian, set fire to the temple of Apollo.

In view of the above, I have created a project on the subject of these two parallel events: the fire at the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, and the composition of the poem "In the Outskirts of Antioch" between November 1932 and April 1933. This was Cavafy's last poem; he died on April 29, 1933.

The project is based on my personal approach to the poem, and also on material I drew from various sources, such as visual material available on the Internet, personal filming, video-frames from films, extracts of texts I have located while researching Cavafy, Julian, the Reichstag fire, etc.

Fires do not usually occur spontaneously, but even if they do, there is always someone, depending on the historical circumstances, who will exploit the event by using convenient scapegoats.

In my project I also refer to events that are happening in our own time, or that might occur.'

Yiannis Theodoropoulos