Skip to main content

Home    Aim    Team       

Heroes in motion

Item

Title

Heroes in motion

Date

4 February 2021

Abstract

If there is one certainty that surpasses all others about the 1821 Revolution, that it is the very face of its protagonists. Generations of citizens in Greece learned to distinguish Papaflessas, Bouboulina or Kolokotronis through specific portraits, before even gaining – or never gaining in some cases – a basic acquaintance with the historicity of these critical figures of the struggle. Over time, these portraits cemented the look of the insurgents, frozen in a few still moments, finally forming a peculiar visual alphabet, through which modern Greek societies literally learned to spell their immediate past. In this talk, Dimitris Polychroniadis and Mitsos Bilalis try to critically approach the above-mentioned images. They try and exchange analytical tools (historiographical and visual) in an attempt to rethink the relationship of modern historical culture with the above images; they try to restore the landscape of tension hidden behind the frozen forms (paintings that were constantly changing for at least half a century before coming up with the relevant portraits, images that move continuously from one social surface to another throughout the 20th century, for example, a poster in a military office, comic book in a teenage room, model in a sculpture workshop, cinematic figure on the city wall, meme on the net, frame at a school party, etc.) they work together on the possibility of rethinking – 200 years later – the founding moment of the modern Greek state as a dense era, an era of unprecedented mobility.

(Edited and translated description of the event, as it was published on Facebook)

Type specialization

Format

Data sets

Language

Bibliographic Citation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI5y_evxFEc
https://www.facebook.com/events/251217616411808/

Number Of Pages - Duration

00:54:43

Rights

All Rights Reserved

note

Fourth lecture of the series: ‘2021/1821: Dialogues in the digital era’.

Position: 9078 (18 views)