In the northern part of Greece lies a town called Drama, a suitable name for a place inhabited (still) by large numbers of refugees, among whom were Angela Melitopoulos's grandparents. The word 'drama' in Greek also means scene, narration or play. All these meanings of the word are relevant to Melitopoulos's story, whose text she will perform live with the images during the festival, with additional quadraphonic sound by Winny Matthias. Her aim in choosing this form of presentation is to draw attention to the relations between the here and now and history, between remembering and forgetting and between the personal and the collective, the general and the particular; concepts which are so characteristic of this project.
Melitopoulos's story is based on two stories which she mixes up with each other in the telling. The first is the story of her grandfather, the second is about her father. The story of her grandfather and his contemporaries is the story of the deportation of large groups of people from Asia Minor to the north of Greece soon after the First World War (1923). Her father's narrative is the story of the occupation of northern Greece by Bulgaria during the Second World War. Germany and Bulgaria were allies at the time and many of the inhabitants of northern Greece fled to Vienna, only to be rounded up there and sent to Hitler's Germany as slave labour. The personal stories of her father and grandfather are supported by the stories of their companions in misfortune. They tell their stories from their own point of view as refugees, and although it proved impossible to make a complete historical reconstruction due to the continuing inaccessibility of some archives – notably the Turkish – these personal narratives together create a picture of the dislocating effect of these events upon the lives of those involved.
At the beginning of this century, after the First World War, there were large groups of refugees: the Austro-Hungarian empire fell apart, as did the Ottoman and Russian. It was a period of confusion which witnessed the foundation of new states and the drawing of new borders respected by international treaties. The new territorial divisions brought about a restructuring of populations and many new states found themselves with large minority groups within their borders. New political systems came into being later in Germany and Spain, and large numbers of people were again forced into exile.
Melitopoulos is concerned less with the pursuit of the whole historical picture than with the recurring task of adapting experience/memory to changing circumstance in order to assimilate to new contexts. It is a concern that touches on questions such as: how does a person remember something, what is the influence of memory and what determines the length of a memory? What was once a moment can become minutes in memory, and something which lasted days, months, or even years can be collapsed to a single sentence or image. The question of the relations between event and memory has also influenced the mode of the visual treatment. Within the web of images and stories each episode has a particular form: the different locations are represented at different speeds and different movements by computer-generated images and sounds. The voices which narrate the sections are the invisible threads that connect the various parts with each other. Things that cannot be narrated appear as the black between the images. Each location figures as a particular zone of time, and the further back in time the images extend, the more they have been visually manipulated. The here and now is reproduced in real time, half-speed signals the documentary time zone of the second generations in Greece and Vienna, and dynamic movement is linked to computer-generated pictures of cities and long trans-European roads that appear familiar rather from the stories told by others than from first-hand personal experience. The stories told by these refugees have been passed on from generation to generation and are rarely mentioned in the official history books. Narrating is also a remembering, a situating and resituating of the events of both one's own personal history and of the history of the people who make up one's environment. To narrate is to make a connection between the self and the other, between the personal and the collective. Forgetting too has a place in the telling of the stories and in the pursuit of the fragmentary information that enables a story to begin: a forgetting at both the personal and collective level, the forgetting of a minority in the history of a majority. It is a forgetting of yesterday that blends with the forgetting of today and the day before yesterday.
The video presents an image of history as hypertext that is comparable to the process of memory itself. It flickers associatively through time and narrative: through the general story that is too huge to contain and too large-scale to grasp; through the very close and personal. History can only be narrated on a human scale, in the individual story where moments are created out of the flux of time that give time itself a form. When the father returns to the scene of his wartime internment there is nothing left there to connect him with his personal history. The buildings are all now used for something else, and among the people now present there is no one who remembers what once happened there or the purpose for which the building was formerly used. There is a vague awareness of possible stories, but the world of the contemporary inhabitants and the world of the earlier resident do not connect with each other. The man looks at his surroundings with other eyes and sees something other than grass that is green and the trees standing over there, even though he may add these new scenes to his history. He, the one who remembers, finds himself among people who do not (cannot) remember, and the unnarratable remains suspended in mid-air.
– Carla Hoekendijk
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Musician: Winny Matthias
Angela Melitopoulos ° 1961, Munich (Germany)
Lives and works in Cologne (Germany)
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