Nadia Kalara, Here we are…home at last_2: Prosimni 1958

The video Prosymni 1958 is the second part of the project in progress with the general title Here we are…Home at last.

An amateur documentary of 1958 reached me via relatives on my mother’s side, migrants to Sweden. The video, in all likelihood recorded on super 8, records the return visit of a migrant to the US, to his village Prosymni, in the prefecture of Argolida which is my mother’s place of origin. The invitation to participate in the exhibition Nice! Stories from the West Side, was the occasion for me to retrieve and process this audiovisual material from my personal archive.

I processed some of the film’s frames with the intention mainly of offering comment on the memory of the image. At all events, the video Prosymni 1958, may be read as an annex to the text Athens-Corinth National Highway. Working on the original material, so closely related to my family’s narrative, does not reflect, as one might think, a search for a “lost” personal identity. Rather, it offers for now, the best occasion for exploring the issues posited by the exhibition. In attempting to relate those issues to the operations of the cinematic model in the artwork, I borrow the words of Pier Paolo Passolini: “Montage effects on the material of the film […] what death actualizes on life”. The project continues.

Konstantinos Matsoukas, Prosymni 1958 – the propitiation of loss

There are language systems in which make no distinction is made between ‘dead’ and ‘unborn’. Both of these exist on the same plane, they belong to a common order. Nadia Kalara’s project Prosymni 1958 aims at a similar equivalence, attempts to establish a similar bridge. It yokes together ‘never again’ and ‘forever’. This conjunction releases the distinctive light of an epiphany, and the emotion that goes with it: recognition/acknowledgement/ acceptance of a loss that belongs to the natural flow of things.

The flow of faces from a different era out of which we, living in the present, have emerged with everything they secreted in our pockets, or denied us. But is this a flow that goes out to sea or one doubling back to its source? Because for some seconds, the impression prevails that all those faces, young and old, men and women, are the same face… A face both emblematic and generic, so that you can only ascribe an identity to it by half-closing your eyes, one which is at the same time a human face and a landscape.

With the documentarist manner of Prosymni, without extravagant gestures or fuss, Kalara appears to move from the ironic aspect of Here We Are …Home at Last#1: Athens-Corinth National Highway, towards something more tangible and personal. The editing and rarity of the archival material rigorously safeqguard her project from platitude, highlighting precisely that luminous nativeness/local specificity which we call our origin. A nativeness which, despite the many occasions where it has been emptied of its content, here, once again, finds a voice and makes a point…

Nadia Kalara seems to aim, through this work at mobilizing a circuit of exchange. Like the peace pipe of the North American Native Nations, she introduces a gift whose purpose is to remain in circulation and reinforce a bond.