Christina Dimitriadis’s Discerning Eye; or, Ten Years Wandering the Aegean

Christina Dimitriadis, a Greek-German artist working primarily with photography, presents her exhibition J’ai perdu mon Eurydice at the Schwartzsche Villa. The project marks the culmination of a body of work she began in 2015, dedicated to an ongoing exploration of the Mediterranean — particularly the Aegean. Across three photographic chapters – Island Hoping, Horizon Wanderers, and J’ai perdu mon Eurydice – she investigates a landscape shaped by history, mythology, and shifting cultural currents.

In J’ai perdu mon Eurydice (2021–25), Dimitriadis follows the traces of ancient marble routes. Marble — emblematic of the ancient world — reveals fundamental anthropological tensions. It embodies the human pursuit of beauty and form, yet it has also served as a material for ideological projection and power. Its permanence is central to its meaning. As substance and symbol, marble carries the aesthetic, historical, and political weight of the Mediterranean world and occupies a foundational place in Europe’s cultural imagination. The same stone that honours memory and refinement can equally stand for hegemony and domination. In its sublimity, marble reflects both splendour and violence — especially where monuments of terror have been erected.

Dimitriadis’s work poses questions about the present condition of southern Europe. Her photographs reflect on the past while engaging the urgencies of the present and future. In a time of rapid transformation, the series examines how historical narratives are continually reinterpreted. This visual journey becomes both an exploration of landscape and a meditation on democracy, migration, and cultural inheritance.

The exhibition takes its title from a line in the opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the ancient Greek story, Orpheus descends into the underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice, only to lose her again. Dimitriadis borrows this line as a metaphor for a personal and cultural condition of lost belonging: contrary to the tradition of passing names across generations, she did not inherit the name Eurydice from her Greek ancestors.

Gluck transformed myth into opera. Dimitriadis, in turn, constructs a new narrative through photography. Multiple identities intertwine within the ruins of a marble theatre she documents. Through her sustained engagement with ancient materials and sites, she reflects on heritage as a living and contested terrain. The exhibition addresses migration, layered identities, and the instability of historical interpretation — revealing the dynamics shaping contemporary societies.

Dimitriadis examines places through what might be described as a discerning eye. Her gaze moves from the rocky islets of Island Hoping to shipwrecks in the Saronic Gulf, to the archipelago of Fournoi Korseon, where an ancient quarry stands beside a beach scattered with white marble pebbles. She also turns to Delos — preserved as an island museum of the ancient Greek world — a site central to J’ai perdu mon Eurydice.

Her photographs reveal a deep knowledge of place. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argued in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977) that built environments are not equally legible to all; they require cultivated perception and lived experience. Understanding space demands attention, knowledge, and a trained eye. Dimitriadis’s work resonates with this notion. Her images do not merely depict locations — they interpret them, revealing subtle relations between memory, material, and landscape.

Rather than illustrating the myth directly, J’ai perdu mon Eurydice approaches it through the symbolism of marble. The white stone becomes a metaphor for longing — echoing Orpheus’s search — and for the fragile persistence of cultural memory. Following ancient marble routes becomes a contemporary odyssey: a movement between loss and retrieval, biography and geopolitics, antiquity and the present.

In recalling the birthplace of theatre and democracy, the work also gestures toward their vulnerability. Amid current tensions in Western societies and renewed pressures on democratic structures, Dimitriadis underscores the role of individual awareness and civic responsibility. The ruins she photographs are not remnants of a closed past; they remain active sites of reflection on Europe’s present condition.

Text by Dr. Christine Nippe Curator of the exhibition and Programme Coordinator for Visual Art Schwartzsche Villa, Steglitz-Zehlendorf Office of Culture