Exhibitions cycle: WHAT IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD? Part 4
In the process of filming, and with camera in hand, acclaimed Greek filmmaker Eva Stefani often visits private and public buildings, hospitals, institutions and offices. During her visits, apart from filming, she collects abandoned archival material – legal and accounting documents, affidavits, bank transactions, medical test results, and X-rays – that lay scattered in all these places. Prompted by the need to seek out secrets that are part of her family history, as well as to expose the unseen aspects of Greek history at large, Stefani tends to collect documents that are somehow related to the aftermath of the Nazi Occupation of Greece and the subsequent Civil War, such as lists of employees dismissed because of their political convictions. Likewise, the family storage room, with its piles of written pages buried in the drawer of a decrepit desk, are all invaluable artefacts brought to light by this visual excavation serving to reveal unknown aspects of family history.
Eva Stefani uses this archival material as a structural element in her installation, newly commissioned by EMΣΤ, entitled The Luminous Cave (2024). With her own personal experience of hospitalisation and her family history as the main source of inspiration, and with reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave, the artist aims to create an experiential space for reflection on the nature of history, the traces of humanity, and how these form part of a both formal and informal history. Probing these microhistories, Stefani calls forth a portrait of a society in flux, coping with the aftermath of trauma and change. Ultimately, the work is a statement against collective amnesia and forgetting at a time dominated by a preoccupation with the present and an unknown future.
Curator: Stamatis Schizakis
BIOGRAPHY
Eva Stefani was born in the USA and lives in Athens. She studied at the Political Science Department of Athens Law School and then completed postgraduate studies in Film Theory and Anthropology at NYU, and film studies with a focus on documentary at the VARAN School in France and the National Film & TV School in the UK. Her doctoral thesis is on representations of Greece in ethnographic cinema (Panteion University, 1997).
Stefani has directed over 30 films exploring a range of subject matter and genres from the ethnographic to the experimental. Notable titles include Letters from the Albatross (1996), Housemates (1999), Acropolis (2001), The Box (2004), Athinai (2007), What time is it? (2007), Bathers (2008), Manuscript (2017), Days and Nights with Dimitra K. (2021). Her films have been screened in numerous international film festivals (Oberhausen, Cinéma du Réel, Fipresci, etc.) and has earned international accolades. Film festivals such as the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and L’Europe autour de l’Europe (FEAE), as well as academic institutions such as New York University and Columbia University, have organised retrospectives of her work. Since 2000, she has participated in international visual art exhibitions, including Documenta 14. In 2019 she represented Greece at the 58th Venice Biennale, with Zafos Xagoraris and Panos Charalambous.
A professor of film studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Faculty of Media and Communication Studies), her latest film is Bull’s Heart, a documentary about the celebrated Greek director, choreographer, visual artist and performer Dimitris Papaioannou.
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