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“Ohne Titel” “Schichtwechselwirkung”

Angela Melitopoulos

The model presented by Angela Melitopoulos and its photograph have been created while she was working on her video “Passing Drama” (1999). The model was reconstructed by her father from memory. It demonstrates the village of his childhood, Ptelea, in northern Greece. “Passing Drama” is an acoustic image of the story of Angela Melitopoulos’s family. It gives an account of their refuge, a story which has been passed on to Angela Melitopoulos over three generations as a fragmentary image. Refuge as the basic motive in “Passing Drama” became the videographic subject of narrative, history and memory. In the film, and now also in the exhibition space, the model and the photograph occupy their own space of narration and remembrance, opening up room for stories. Some of these stories are told by Angela Melitopoulos in her text “Schichtwechselwirkung”. Like “Passing Drama”, this text is mainly about intensities and impossibilities of remembering a history that has still not been digested and is almost non-existent within the collective memory.
Following the Lausanne treaty, nearly 1.5 million Greeks were forced to leave their villages in Turkey and, vice versa, 500000 Turks were displaced from their hometowns in the Greek territory in 1923. In the course of this removal and the deportations, the “catastrophe of Asia Minor”, Angela Melitopoulos’s grand-parents arrived in Ptelea. During World War II, Greece was occupied by a German-Bulgarian alliance, and her father, at the age of 18, was displaced as a slave worker to an SS labour camp in Maria- Lanzendorf near Vienna. Finally, in the 1950s, the crisis of the tobacco industry entailed labour migration from Greece. Her father went to Munich. This family’s biography shows a personal as well as a political continuity of migration and refuge from World War I over slave work to German “guest labour”. This continuity also relates to the question of who was involved in creating the infrastructure of modern economies, and who has profited from it.

Artist, born 1961, lives and works in Cologne.

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Angela Melitopoulus