The screening is followed by a talk with artist Ellie Ga, moderated by Helena Papadopoulos, founder, Radio Athénes.
Strophe, a Turning (2017) opens with the artist quoting the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam who compares launching a message in a bottle to the act of writing a poem to an unknown reader. Taking cues from both a bottle at sea and the beachcomber who eventually happens upon it, Ga initially developed the work out of her interest in how drifting objects have been used to chart sea movement.
But her willingness to drift and follow uncertain turns, carries her unexpectedly to the Greek island of Symi, and then to the shores of its neighbour Lesvos, during the summer of 2015.
Ga is confronted by the mutable context of these islands, and decides to join a team of volunteers aiding asylum seekers and refugees—a definitive turning point at which she is forced to wrestle not only with the poetics of accidental drift, but with urgent political and humanitarian realities with which she confronts, processes, and situates within a nuanced and complex history of endurance, faith, and indeed, chance.