The video performance “INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA” explores the body’s memory of trauma and the process of release from it. Through a physical practice of contact with mud (a reference to Ana Mendieta)  the body becomes a landscape, a battlefield, and a site of rebirth. The mud acts as a filter between the “inside” and the “outside,” as a skin that sometimes protects and sometimes harms its surroundings, while the subject struggles to shed the imprints of guilt, fear, and shame.

The theoretical background draws on Donald Winnicott’s concept of the False Self, which describes how a person adapts to oppressive environments at the expense of their authentic being. The bodily act thus becomes a gesture of resistance against the emotional manipulation passed down through generations.

The performance traces a passage from silent submission to a radical acceptance of the traumatic condition (a reconciliation with the Shadow, in Carl G. Jung’s terms ) and finally, to the desire for the emergence of the True Self, claiming space and active presence.

Individual project by Vasilis Ntellis
D.O.P : Maria Tachtatzoglou
Supervising professor: Christina Mitsani