Daphné Hérétakis

Venue

Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon (macLyon)

Lyon

Born in 1987 in Paris, France
Lives and works in Paris, France and Athens, Greece

It was 2021. COVID had emptied the streets of Athens. More than a decade of economic crisis and austerity had already transformed the city. Daphné Hérétakis found herself feeling, as she put it, “stuck – in every sense of the word”. She took her camera into the streets to find out whether what was on her mind was also on the minds of others. What We Ask of A Statue Is That It Doesn’t Move begins with a dream in which she returns to her childhood home to find her family frozen like statues. Taking as its point of departure the Greek poet Yorgos Makris’s post-war manifesto of 1944 calling for the destruction of the Parthenon, the film explores what it would take to shake off the weight of history. What would it take to wake from the nightmare of paralysis, to recover a sense of political agency, and to begin to move again?

Daphné Hérétakis’ films develop as open-ended inquiries, weaving together encounters, personal narratives, and historical references to examine how collective memory and heritage operate in the present and are rooted in intimate lives and personal histories.