A film about memory and material culture in Thessaly, Greece. It is centered on a journey undertaken by two local men, a visual anthropologist, and two cinematographers. The men drove from the plain of Thessaly to the ‘National Resistance Museum’ in Rentina, hoping to find anything related to the biographies of the local men’s siblings, which were lost during the Greek Civil War. The film explores the complex entanglement between browsing the landscape, and remembering local and global histories. ‘Dowsing the Past’ also investigates the dynamics of ethnographic encounter that emerged in the meeting between young Athenian urbanites and senior local men in Thessaly.
Konstantinos Kalantzis
Konstantinos Kalantzis is a sociocultural anthropologist (PhD) working on the intersections of visual culture and political imagination. He is author of Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power, and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete (IUP, 2019), co-editor of the volume Citizens of Photography (Duke University Press, 2022) and director of the ethnographic films Dowsing the Past (2014) and the Impossible Narration (2021). He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in rural and urban Greece and has taught at various universities in the UK, the US and Greece. He is a recipient of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2019 JB Donne Essay Prize on the Anthropology of Art. He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Thessaly (Department of Culture and Creative Media and Industries) and a Lecturer in Anthropology and Visual Culture at UCL.