Stefania Orfanidou, Pendulum

101 PH • L’Aquila, Italy

AK: Please introduce yourself: What is your name, where are you from, what do you do?

SO: I am Stefania Orfanidou, born in Kavala, a seaside city in the north of Greece. Kavala used to be called the »Mecca of tobacco« because of the tobacco cultivation and industry that supported its economy from 1840 and for more than a century. In this city, I grew up with the conviction that one day I would become an archaeologist. Instead, I studied architecture and photography and currently I work with both disciplines. As an architect, I founded in 2019 the studio Chora Atelier, based in Athens and Chania, Greece. As a photographer I started creating my own narratives since 2015.

AK: What is your relationship with photography, and how did you get into it?

SO: In 2011 I spent a semester in Madrid with the Erasmus program, in Fine Arts School at Complutense University. There, I chose a photography class, and with a small camera I started exploring the city and I began taking photographs. The prolific cultural and photographic scene of Madrid, gradually unlocked a drawer inside me. On my return to Greece I followed courses on history and contemporary photography at Stereosis School in Thessaloniki, and for the next three years I was searching for my own path of expression.

In 2015 I published the dummy Jaguar Sun, a photographic essay focused on the perception on intimacy. After this very first experience, the process of shooting, editing and sequencing photographs became an addictive relationship. It gave me the possibility to express certain affects I was going through, such as in the recently published book «Cold Turkey» and to create my own tales blending the imaginary with the realistic element.

AK: What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?

SO: All of my pictures come from spontaneous hooks of the gaze at objects, faces or landscapes that look familiar or uncanny, unrealistic, surrealistic, when inside them there is the suspicion of something hidden, mythical, something that is not always obvious and this something triggers me to capture it in order to decode it later in my atelier. I am interested in the function of memory and oblivion, so, unconsciously, I seek for these layers and traces of unrecorded history, that are covered by the presence of myths.

AK: What is the story you want your pictures to tell?

SO: In my practice, the sequencing and the composition of images plays an important role in the creation of a tale, in the same way that words create sentences and then paragraphs. My stories are inspired from the everyday life, usually driven from personal experiences—traumatic or interrogative—and they are connected either to my relationship to a certain place, such as the city of L'Aquila in my book «Pendulum», or with mythology, dreams, forgotten memories, outlandish events, traumas and grief, such as in «Cold Turkey», «Cache» and «Profanation Exercises». Upon reflection, I would dare to say that all of my projects, are a gesture of healing.

AK: Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?

SO: Currently I would choose Sana'a, in Yemen, due to its profound cultural heritage and its architecture that is unique and extraordinarily beautiful, completely different from the western standards. It is also a city that I re-discovered recently through the eyes of Pier Paolo Pasolini in his touching short film Le Mura di Sana'a (The Walls of Sana'a). Unfortunately, Yemen is still suffering from a long destructive civil war, so visiting this country is quite difficult at the present.

AK: What is your personal relationship to cities, and how do you perceive them as places in general?

SO: I grew up in the city of Kavala, and so far I have lived in Thessaloniki, Madrid, Rotterdam, L'Aquila, Athens and Chania. Each city was and is unique in the way I experience and perceive it, depending on my occupation in each place, the friends I make, the history that it carries, the architecture, the cultural activity, the free time I have to wander around and discover uncharted neighboorhoods, the level of integration with the locals that I achieve. All of them are places wοven by multiple layers of history, games of power that shape the morphology and the character of the public realm, public spaces where people gather and make themselves visible. But mostly, cities are the locus of collective memory, a memory that is generated in the present, through the synthesis of those elements that carry with them a piece of its identity.  

AK: Regarding your project «Pendulum»: What was your intention, and how did you come up with the idea?

SO: «Pendulum» was born in L'Aquila, Italy, in 2015, when I moved there to work on the reconstruction of the city, that was destroyed by an earthquake back in 2009. «Pendulum» is a visual approach of a return journey and my relationship with this city, that starts back in 1977, when my parents moved there from Greece and met each other in the university. I grew up with their stories and I learned the Italian language at a small age, in order to come closer to their friends from their past.

The uncanny condition I met, though, as a newcomer architect, collided with the familiar image I had created in my mind as a child, an image shaped also from my two earlier visits in the past. In the beginning, there was no intention at all to create a project related to this place, so I was capturing photographs only for my project «Cold Turkey». «Pendulum» was born some months later, out of the accumulation of photos that were creating a different chapter, a narration about the quake's resonance.

Only then did I understand that there was a rupture, a trauma I was trying to heal by capturing its imprints from a close distance. After one year of living there, I left L'Aquila before its reconstruction was completed. I moved to Athens, where I started editing for two years the photographic material in the form of a book, till I published it in 2019. Pendulum, ended up being a process of re-writing this place in my memory, as an act of reconciliation and restoration of my relationship with L'Aquila.

AK: Which project did you never finish?

SO: Those that I never started and stayed as ideas in my head.

AK: What is that one thing you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?

SO: I regret mostly for those that I have seen while traveling through high-speed roads, in places where stopping the car or approaching the desired object was almost impossible at the time.

AK: If you could travel back/forth in time, what advice would you give your younger/older self?

SO: Not to be afraid to leave behind things or images with which I get emotionally attached and they have no real value.

AK: What do you prefer saying: «to take a photograph» or to «make a photograph», and why?

SO: I would rather say «to shoot a photograph» as the instant death of that moment that is captured inside the camera. I experienced this feeling quite intensely in L'Aquila while working on «Pendulum», because the reconstruction in the historical center was changing so fast certain environments and especially the construction sites where I was supervising the procedure, that often I had only that very moment to capture an image before it was gone forever.

AK: What is the most interesting experience you have had while photographing?

SO: Usually, nothing spicy happens during my photoshootings. I can recall, though, one moment, while being in L'Aquila, that I really felt fear and excitement at the same time. I was strolling on a Sunday morning with my roommate in the city center, and at that time many alleys and streets were characterized as red zone and the entry was prohibited. Our curiosity, though, to explore more places and hidden courtyards made us overpass the red nets and enter into an unknown territory. An open door led us to a very large patio, probably of a monastery. At the center of the patio, there were accumulated stones from the debris of the earthquake. At the very 'end' of the patio, on the opposite side of the entrance, there was a huge wooden door, standing alone with a wall made of stone, in the open air. It was closed.

We went closer, and looked each other in the eyes with curiosity and fear. I nodded off and my roommate touched the handle of the closed door and turned it down. With a small imperceptible push, the door opened easily. We were in another open space, probably the yard of another complex of buildings for nuns or monks. We walked through this space. On our left, a wall had collapsed. In front of us it was revealed the interior of a church, that later we realized it was the cathedral, il duomo, with its ecclesiastic organ, a blue veil covering a fresco, decorative details exposed to all weather conditions. This image felt like an open wound, the raw representation of the trauma and the violence that left behind the earthquake in the city.

I stood there speechless for some minutes. I shot the photograph and we left, being careful not to get caught.

AK: If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?

SO: Actually, I already made steps to implement in my artistic practice more dimensions, such as structures, texts and sound. I worked on installations adapted to site-specific spaces, where the experiential aspect of the exhibition is fundamental. I explored design and modeling, as well as the materiality of printed photographs and its transformation into sculptures, in a visible or hidden display. For the first time, I also combined my architectural background with photography and part of this effort can be seen in my latest exhibition »Daedala«, that took place in Chania, Crete in November 2021.

AK: How would you describe one of your pictures to a blind person?

SO: Dark in their subject, but bright in their colors and the message they intend to transmit.

AK: What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?

SO: Currently I am working on the series «Profanation Exercises», composed by multiple chapters in the form of short photographic tales. In each story I deal with reality in a way that alters it, as an exercise of its deconstruction and re-appropriation within a new form. The surrealistic and mythical element of sequencing helps me to structure each story, by disarticulating the very experience of everyday life.

This montage, gives birth to unexpected encounters and, thus, it turns into an act of resistance against the paralysis, in front of one threat, the unknown, the inexplicable, it becomes a gesture both of self and collective rescue.

AK: Thank you, Stefania!

Editorial Notes:

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Photography: Stefania Orfanidou (2015–2017)
Location: L’Aquila, Italy

Links: Website, Instagram, Facebook, Chora Atelier