To a certain degree sacredness is in the eye of the beholder / Act II

In July 1933, the cruise Pâtris II sponsored by CIAM—Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, left Marseilles, its final destination being Athens; the main representatives of the Modern Movement were aboard, one among them being the architect Le Corbusier. 36 years later, Pier Paolo Pasolini will reenact in filmic terms another journey, this time from the East to the West, that of Euripide’s Medea, played by Maria Callas.

Stefania Strouza’s expansive installation takes as its starting point these two journeys, inserting them into a larger narrative related to Greek modernity, informed by the West-East dipole and the conflicting imaginaries it entails. In the work, hybrid constructions referring to Medea’s archaic world, primitivism and geographical locations of the Orient, interact with a visual code inspired by European geometric abstraction; the latter, created through the reproduction of Medea’s typeface from the film release poster, alludes to the journey of 1933 as that of an encounter between an archaic past and its interpretation by the modern movement. In the installation, these fragile monuments serve as silent guides, suggesting a cultural discord between a foreign-installed rational ethos and a mythical pre-modern mentality.

Presented in the group exhibition Afresh: A New Generation of Greek Artists, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, 2013