Catalogue > At random

A container ship is not an inanimate object. The ship that travels thousands of miles on the high seas is full of life, stories, tragedy and hope. The harbours reached, the industrial landscape one encounters, the cargo that floats in an endless ocean. Anina is a psycho-geographic film-essay, documenting the ethnographic tendencies of the industrial landscape and its malevolent stature over the individual. The shipping industry’s ever-shifting landscape, affecting even this interaction you are having with this text, crafts its own mythology.

Alcaeus Spyrou (b.1991, Elbasan, Albania) is a visual artist working with the cinematic image. He was born on the day the fall of the Hoxha dictatorship in Albania. The conflict that ensued, forced his family to seek refuge in Athens, Greece. The frequent displacement and oscillation between the two topographies, would focus Alcaeus’s gaze towards the shifting landscape of migration. In his practice, Alcaeus utilizes a psychoanalytical scope on cinema to deconstruct the inter-dependent nature of the medium. Through this process, he searches for new dialects of the cinematic language. By combining the two antithetical genres of fiction and non-fiction he establishes connections with the alienated environment. He informs the mythologies of contemporary migration that reveal collective trauma as the substance of our intricate relations to the other.