Erica Scourti: "Out of Time", 2013

"Friends, family and online social media contacts were invited to contribute a voice-recording of a few lines of Cavafy’s poetry that had significance to them, along with some written reflections of the memories associated with it. In the video, fragments of the poems are weaved together to create a snapshot in Greek and English of his work remembered by a diverse range of people across countries and generations.

The mix of voices are accompanied by a slideshow of Greek postcards on a digital tablet, which are flipped through, zoomed in on and panned across by fingers touching the screen so that these generic and familiar images of an idyllic, impossibly serene Greece of collective imagination become abstract and almost unrecognizable. The gesture of the hand touching the screen echoes the tactile sense of history in Cavafy’s poetry, where art has the power to bring back both personal moments and people, and historical, mythical figures from the past and make them live again in the present.

Postcards are also physical, material objects that evoke memories of a sense of a specific time and place in one’s personal history. Yet in the video, the fragmented images and the restless movement of the hand suggest the difficulty, and even futility, of attempting to capture a past moment, echoing another sentiment in Cavafy’s work, that of the perpetual passing of time and the importance of seizing life and living it in the present.

Adding another temporal layer, the written reflections on his poetry move between personal insight, memory and description while acting as oblique, indirect subtitles, translating the voice across languages but also re-interpreting his work from the perspective of his present day readers and audience."

—Erica Scourti