Giorgina Pi — Miasma

miasma is a video installation that emerges from within Lemnos, an artistic research trajectory initiated in 2022 and dedicated to the relationships between Greek myth, historical memory, and contemporary landscape, developed through fieldwork conducted mainly in Greece. After a first stage for the stage built around the myth of Philoctetes—filtered through twentieth-century rewritings by authors such as Adrienne Rich and Yannis Ritsos—the project returns to the actual island that, in the twentieth century, definitively fractured the myth: Makronisos, a site of detention and political re-education during the Greek Civil War.

It is from this gesture of return that miasma arises. Shot between 2022 and 2026 on the uninhabited island off the coast of Attica, the installation interrogates Makronisos as a space of resonance between history and myth, between ruin and persistence. The landscape appears as a surface crossed by almost invisible traces: remnants of internment camps, voids, fragments, thresholds. Through images, field recordings, sound environments, and textual inserts, the work constructs a fragile geography in which history continues to sediment in the present, oscillating between memory and oblivion. If, in the myth of Philoctetes, the hero’s solitude originates in an infected wound (a body excluded and abandoned because it is contaminated, marked by what the Greek world called miasma ), in the twentieth century the term re-emerges in a violent political twist: the Greek right and monarchy used it to name the supposed ideological “infection” of communism. It is in this slippage, between bodily impurity and the persecution of thought, that the work finds its most unsettling core. miasma does not look at myth as a repertoire, but as an active device: a field of forces in which exile, violence, narration, and landscape continue to produce images, ghosts, and forms of awareness in the present.