Eliza Tamo




Murmur
2020

Seascapes of the English Channel and of the North Sea between 2016 and 2018 printed on original postcards of the pre WWI period. The photographs of the two bodies of water that physically separate and unite Great Britain with mainland Europe are combined with the inscriptions of the writers, evoking playful and allegorical impressions on Brexit.      




Who wants to sleep in their mother’s womb tonight

2019

The work consists of a collection of images of and around the Aegean Sea with a sonographic aesthetic. Taking into consideration the historical time, the myths, the cultural significance and the harsh present political reality of the Aegean Sea I wanted to give a material existence to an unseen world where the living and the dead coexist. A non-­ ‐ place of both safety and barbarism that reflects our common destiny and blurs the boundaries between the two worlds. The title borrows itself from a phrase the Druze fighters used to shout going into battle.          




AND.THE.FOLLOWING.YEAR.THE.WAR.CAME AND.THE.YEAR.FOLLOWING.THE.WAR.CAME

2016     

In the book I combine archive images of the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Crete (the invasion of Crete by the Axis in May 1941) with photographs of my walk around  a campsite located near Rethymno, which was a battleground during the invasion. The archive film shot by Franz Peter Weixler, a war propaganda           photographer for Axis, witnesses the lead up and then execution of civilians as a reprisal for the resistance of the local population during the invasion. In my work I concentrate on the idea of the walk as a meditation    and a way to engage past and present spaces. I blend the walk which the women, men and children of the village were asked to take by the soldiers with my walk on the specific location in a way that could offer an alternative narrative of the event; one that attempts to restore and repair the violence that has taken place and  one that is not constrained in a linear interpretation of time.



Bid

2018

Bid started as an attempt to visually explore ideas developed in Henry Miller's “The        Colossus of Maroussi” a travelogue set in pre ‐ war Greece. I was particularly interested in the interpretation of his quote “When you spot anything true and clear you are at zero. Zero is Greek for pure visibility”. The work is an instinctive and spontaneous response to the landscape blended with autobiographical elements. During the editing process I reflected upon ideas of change, human growth and purpose within our current social and political reality. I wanted to visualise a sense of pause that flirts with aggression and that suggests a state of being on the verge of violence. At the same time ‐ and perhaps contradictory ‐ I aimed to depict a place where nothing is calculated and calculable. A world which transforms so much as            to remain the same.        



State of Things

2011

During the formation of the Turkish and Greek nation states in the early 20th century the Greeks of the Black Sea –known as Pontic Greeks ‐ were ethnically cleansed and forcibly uprooted along with millions other Christians of the former Ottoman Empire. Almost a hundred years after this event I travel to the historical area of Pontus in the southern coast of the Black Sea in an attempt to reconstruct my lost family archive. The work looks into the power relations between knowledge, experience and truth that produce an archive and its role in forming identities and national history.

       



Athenian Sketches

2015

The work documents my wider neighbourhood of central Athens where I grew up which I now find myself coming back to as a visitor. In the work I combine street and family snapshots with a museum ‐ load of forgotten marbles and symbols. The sketches project a recollection of carefree childhood memories of the locality onto    its present day, constructing future memories from a present that I have not lived in. I attempt to both aesthetisize and politicize my subjects in an effort to seek unity in the variety of experience of the city of Athens. The work focuses on the body, both as the social body and the individual’s body, and on the effects of power operating on it. I am interested in the physicality and materiality of power under neoliberal capitalism and our response to it.



Strigiformes 

2016

Strigiformes is a photographic col lection that sees itself as a play. It consists of photographs I took between 2008 and 2016 combined with a handful of photographs my dad took in Athens back in the early eighties using the exact same camera. The backdrop is one of a city in debt and continuous recession of nine years. The characters are some of the same family, their friends, strangers living in the same neighbourhood. You can find them at home on a lazy summer afternoon, some are having a cigarette break at work, others attending a funeral. Very often are constantly on the move, trying to catch up with the past. The camera is used as a diversion to escape boredom and stillness. It is a way to create some peace out of the clash of History and histories; a way to comment on the division of what we look at and what we know. Ultimately I am interested in form. The form of continuity, the form of events, the form of actions.

 



Little Square Half Circle

2018

The work examines how the aspiration for a unified Europe manifested itself in two different periods in Greek history, during the Axis occupation of Greece in the 1940s and in the unfolding Greek economic crisis of more recent times.

In the work I use archive material of civilian executions by the Axis, photographs I have taken across Greece, text and handmade books to create the idea of votive offerings. The work is a collection of totems, statues and sacred objects that serve as relics of the historical unrepresentable in times of a procrustean shaped everyday.

       



The Daughter of the Pissarro Oak

2017

The Daughter of the Pissarro Oak evokes experiences and emotions of motherhood. It is a record of the time I spent in green spaces at my neighbourhood in South London since I became a mother; an activity that resurfaced childhood memories of such spaces being a place for play and social interaction. The documentation of the walks in woods, parks and even of our garden is a literal depiction of the repetitive nature characterizing a mother’s labour of love and the alienation of a mother’s everyday. The landscape and in particular the tree is seen as a metaphor for perceived ideas on the nature of a woman and her role as a mother. The work draws on pictorial principals of impressionism. In particu lar the choice of a modest subject matter and the use of light as an indication of the passing of time. The title is a reference to Camille Pissarro and his painting  « Lordship Lane Station » which he made in what is now the Sydenham Hill Wood in South London.