The river where you set your foot just now is gone

Alexandra Niaka & Fanis Sakellariou / Greece

‘The most intense thing I experienced during the storm, the one that will remain engraved in me until I die, was the roar of the water when everything else had gone quiet.’
THE RIVER WHERE YOU SET YOUR FOOT JUST NOW IS GONE explores water as a source of creation and memory, drawing from a Thessalian belief that, once a year, the dead return through water to share stories across time. Rooted in Thessaly’s floods, the work reflects on how catastrophe reshapes memory, landscape and collective identity.
Anchored in Astritsa, the director’s village, the project grows from field research. Testimonies, songs, flood archives, 3D scans and regional folklore form a narration where water appears as disaster, passage and memory. In the digital environment, the submerged village becomes the point of departure for a speculative journey. Witches cross water-made lands and lower the moon into wells,where the dead may appear and speak. Along the rivers, nymph-like figures emerge from bridges and guide the visitors through fragments of flood-stricken houses and fields. These scenes use myth as a narrative tool through which catastrophe can be felt beyond documentation. In the physical space,sculptural wells hold the voices of flood survivors. Testimonies describe how villagers gathered on the village’s only hill, helped one another survive, stayed in contact with those trapped by the water, and witnessed the destruction. Embedded videos combine footage recorded during the floods with later journeys through Thessaly, after the water’s retreat. The work brings these layers together as an immersive encounter, where documentary evidence, folklore and digital reconstruction allow grief to emerge as a spatial, collective and living experience.

The research for ‘The river where you set your foot just now is gone’ was supported by Onassis AiR and Onassis ONX.