I am_Iphigenia

I am_Iphigenia belongs to a larger project of video drama called I am_. It draws inspiration
from the video art medium, the visual arts portrait, Ancient Greek Tragedy and global
politics, specifically war and crisis. Ancient Greek tragic personas become material for
inspiration for a series of visual arts works videoportraits, where, the position of tragic
heroes and heroines take simple, everyday people, who utter on the screen fragments of
tragedies. We choose simple, everyday people, not professional actors, as possibly
expected, because Ancient Greek Tragedy is said to be a universal phenomenon still
communicating with our lives. We want to explore whether heroes and heroines of Ancient
Greek Tragedy can be within our common reach and understanding, not just within actors’
methods and techiques.
Following a contemporary, intertextual strategy, specific fragments taken from Ancient
Greek tragedies are selected for each hero/heroine, that may belong to more than one
tragedy but, in our opinion, conceptually summarize the essence of each tragic persona.
All the works belonging to the project follow a common visual code, that of the portrait.
In I am_Iphigenia, seven girls in seven video portraits utter sentences from Ancient Greek Tragedy, conversing with the tragic figure of Iphigenia. An allegory on global crisis and war, with connotations about the current “lost” youth generation in the Greek Crisis. Like tabula rasa, the young people destinies await to be written, but are usually decided by older, mature people in power.