Reflective Encounters

“While the rain lashes down on the reservoir, a woman weaves textiles before tending to her livestock in the barn. When it clears, two men seize the opportunity to venture into the woods with their dogs. This might appear to be a portrait of a serene pastoral idyll were it not for what haunts its centre: the disconcerting sight of the roofs of buildings protruding from the lake’s lowering levels.

In Thanasis Trouboukis’s film, the water acts as an uncanny conduit to a prior time: a flood can destroy but it can also selectively preserve history beneath its surface, the skeletal fragments revealed by its receding depths analogous to those certain memories which find themselves improbably salvaged from the oblivion of forgetting. Night falls, and with their daily rhythms complete the people gather for a candlelit vigil, suggesting the conscious memorialising of something which has passed. The water will rise once again in the morning, but the visions it has revealed are haunted not only by a half-forgotten past but perhaps too by the looming spectre of an ecologically uncertain future.”

— Jonathan Bygraves