Athina Botonaki

“A young woman recalls some of her last encounters with her father. Through a fragmentary landscape of memory she unravels the chronicle of a fatal epidemic of nostalgia, as perceived by two different generations.”

Personal memory, loss, and grief, disguised in the form of our belongings, shape our intimate spaces. Hoarding, as a compulsive behaviour, seems to provide a sense of safety and control through the accumulation of possessions, as it satisfies the need to keep one's environment intact. Yet the things we choose to surround ourselves with are usually nostalgic traces, not only of past experiences, but also of general time periods that we, ourselves, may never have known. Can we then see compulsive accumulation as something creative? Or, in other words, is hoarding a world-building practice?

FAR FROM IT is an installation that hovers between a theatre play and an audio book. Placed on a small stage, it is a set frozen in time; filled with traces of a performance that has already happened. It invites us to have a look at nostalgia and migration through the lens of the current climate crisis and the inevitable end of the world as we know it.

[duration 15min.]