THIS TOO WILL NOT PASS

This Too Will Not Pass is a multimedia installation developed as part of the APT Studios and Fenton Arts Trust Mentorship Award.

APT Gallery
“APT Introduces” 22.06-02.07.2023
London, UK

In October 2022, unusually heavy rainfall caused a small dry stream to overflow, flooding the commercial quarter of the town of Sitia in Lasithi, Crete. Unaccustomed to such influxes, the historically dry soil of the nearby fields couldn’t contain the downpour and transformed into lethal muds dragging cars, debris, trash, and animals into the sea. As the town itself disappeared into sludge, the only bits of infrastructure that survived the poorly planned streets were the spires of palm trees at the ports and the sanguine eyes of the turbines whose blades continued to lacerate the sky. 

This wasn’t the first time that things had gone missing in Sitia. In the previous years, people had been slowly disappearing from the recesses of the island town. The farmers who didn’t return home after nightfall, children who played in the streets and turned the wrong corner, stray dogs chasing each other into the dark, and then finally entire families who had the misfortune of walking through the familiar palms of the Vai Forest that swallowed them whole. 

When the waters of the floods receded, residents who had fled the disaster began to return and excavate the remains of their homes. As they dug and sifted through their interred dwellings, the community caught glimpses of familiar faces following pawprints in the mud. It became clear that the town they once called theirs now belonged to something else. 


Floods have long served as harbingers for new worlds and metaphors for changes in human existence. 

Whether through religious, mythological, or other preserved histories the survivors in our species marked these cataclysmic events through word of mouth, myth, and physical remnants carried stories into the future. In our current age of manufactured, dire climate collapse, floods are changing daily existence and reinforcing systemic social divides, along class, ability, race, and gender lines that determine the chances for survival. As landscapes evolve, we must grapple with the emotional and physical upheavals that will have unknown impacts for years to come. In this setting, here and now, an emotional landscape is constructed, offering narratives for us to process these upheavals through a new, uncanny mode of existence. 

In the speculative world of Eleni Zervou, distances and connections between the islands of Crete and the United Kingdom merge into the mediated experience of grief from afar by the spread of events through news, myth, and rumor. From her position in the UK, Zervou conjures a domicile that blends the real with the uncanny to create a world that reaches into localized experiences of Sitia in Lasithi, Crete. These moments intersect and unfold in London through an emotive scene, evoking alternate intimate kinships unbound by binary conceptions of being.

Situated in a constructed domestic space, taking cues from rural Cretan homes, the eyes of the INHABITANTS of this reality focus on Zervou’s family footage. Through them, she interrogates what it might mean to witness and be affected by an evolving uncanny world, through mourning and fight. As the INHABITANTS watch, their direct stares defy easy categorization and confront their new reality–reminding us that This Too Will Not Pass.

-exhibition text by Maria Joranko

Special thanks to:

Evangelia Anagnostaki, Giorgos Anagnostakis, Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez Cambana, Maria Joranko and Victoria Rance

Supported by:

APT Studios

Fenton Arts Trust

W P Notcutt Limited

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