Preview of the work of Marianna Christofides

Marianna Christofides
μελέτες (Studien), 2020
Two-channel-16mm film installation in collaboration with Almut Kühne; color and b/w, sound
Text intervention
Color vinyl

In the installation ‘μελέτες (studies)’, Marianna Christofides, together with the vocalist Almut Kühne, attempts to approach the phenomenon of the female guards in Ravensbrück. This is done, among other things, on a medium that is in itself coeval with the historical events at Ravensbrück, that is 16mm b/w ORWO film. ORiginal WOlfen is the successor company of the Agfa plants in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, where there was a subcamp supervised by the camp of Ravensbrück until 1944. Thus the materiality of the medium becomes part of a narrative of celluloid production, forced labour, mass extermination

and the share of the female guards in it. The films contain images from the surroundings of Ravensbrück, the memorial’s archive, and footage of a performance lasting several days, in which the permeability of the everyday and its inherent potential of terror is revealed in the interspace between the two. Through the unsettling of rigid forms of language as a supposedly unambiguous carrier of meaning, the montage of heterogeneous constellations, reflections and refractions of light and perspective, a sense of instability and contradiction gradually gains expression. The intervention thus produces an alienating sensory experience: in the materiality of voice and place, a network of forces and intensities takes on a temporary form.

Marianna Christofides works across disciplines and media, using installations, film and text. In 2011 she represented Cyprus at the Venice Biennale. Currently, she holds a scholarship of the Berlin arts program "Artistic Research" and is the 2020 award winner of the innogy foundation VISIT.