Video art on Byzantine dress
In Wilhelm Jensen’s 1903 novel «Gradiva, a Pompeiian Fantasy,» a young archaeologist who is the story’s main hero falls in love with the female figure depicted in a Hellenistic relief sculpture and imagines her in real life. He roams Pompeii in search of her but instead meets a young lady who turns out to be his childhood sweetheart. Several years after it was written, the story of Gradiva inspired Freud to make an analogy between archaeology and digging into the subconscious. Far from just an archaeological remnant of the past, Gradiva was, according to Freud, a vital part of the present, a figure that triggered a journey into one’s emotions and inner world and served as an occasion for self-discovery. It is a similar journey, in this case a journey in time, that Vassilis Zidianakis – a costume designer, independent costume curator and co-founder and artistic director of Atopos (described as an experimental forum of the visual arts) – and British artist and filmmaker Marcus Tomlinson were inspired to make when they came across a post-Byzantine woman’s dress, one of the finds at the Museum of Mystras. Discovered by archaeologist Nikolaos Drandakis in 1955 at graves near the Church of Aghia Sofia in the archaeological area of Mystras, the remnants of this dress are a rare specimen of women’s clothing from the post-Byzantine period, whose rarity equals that of a piece of clothing dating from the 11th century and found at the archaeological site Aghio Achilleion in the area of Prespa. Fifty years after the dress remnants’ discovery, the pieces were sent for restoration and analysis at the Musees des Arts in Geneva and have been kept at the Museum of Mystras ever since. As of the beginning of next month, visitors to the museum will be presented with a contemporary work of video art by Marcus Tomlinson that views this rare find from an artistic angle. It all began a few months earlier, when archaeologist Pari Kalamara came up with the idea of commissioning a contemporary work of art that would add a fresh artistic angle on one of the museum’s holdings. Her initiative is actually part of a broader program that is promoted by the Ministry of Culture’s directorate of museums, exhibitions and archaeological programs, a program that seeks alternative ways of presenting the finds in archaeological museums across the country. It is within this broader program and with the funding of the Third Community package that a website has already been created on the archaeological site of Mystras and several publications have been released. Having seen Tomlinson’s video «Infusion» (a take on the traditional fustanella pleated skirt), a commission of Atopos for the exhibition «Ptychoseis» that was held in 2004 at the Benaki Museum New Wing, Kalamara approached founder of Atopos Vassilis Zidianakis and asked him for help. Perhaps because of his background in anthropology, ethnology and the history of civilizations (his post doctorate is on post-Byzantine ecclesiastical vestments), from all the other finds Zidianakis was most bewitched by the post-Byzantine female dress. As with many of the projects initiated by Atopos, the idea was to present the find in an interdisciplinary fashion that brought the past into the present. Zidianakis turned to Tomlinson, who finally came up with «Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,» a video that does not serve as explanatory material for the particular find but as a contemporary artistic conceptualization of a remnant from the past and an independent work of art. In the video, the remnants of the post-Byzantine dress are seen flying through the air and coming together in very slow motion, almost like meteorites or the pieces of a puzzle on the body of a female standing figure (a dancer and collaborator of director Bob Wilson, Marianna Kavallieratou). In the final frame, the garment is dismantled again and the figure is seen standing in a spare outfit. The past is reconstituted into the present and then broken down, opening the way to the future. «Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow» marks an opening of the field of archaeology in Greece to contemporary art and alternative ways of drawing a broader public into museums. It adds a contemporary dimension onto a relic of the past, breathes life into it and allows visitors of the museum to navigate into the past by using their imagination. The past may be irretrievable but our memory of it and fantasies about it are what keeps history both interesting and alive. The dress and its remnants The female dress whose remnants belong to the Mystras museum is dated to the beginning of the 15th century and both the site where it was found (the temple of Aghia Sofia was the church of the palace) as well as the material, weaving and motifs of the actual dress indicate it may have belonged to a lady from the higher classes of society, probably the wife or daughter of a high-standing state official at the despotate of Moreas. According to the studies conducted both in Geneva and Greece, the dress was probably imported from the West and is proof of the continuous commercial transactions between the Byzantine Empire and the West. The dress consisted of an inner and outer part made of silk and cut in a deep V-shaped pattern. Vassilis Zidianakis reconstituted the dress for the purposes of the video using gauze for the inner part and for a diaphanous effect and tyvek (a plastic-type material) for the outer part. The motifs were hand-painted on the dress’s outer part and then cut out in its constituent parts.
