Where to start writing for Tina? In the oriental echoes of the humming sounds orin the ‘melismatic voice that dampened the sounds of the animal?’ i In the moving parts of elderly horses that evoke a combination of early cinematic movement and Parajanov orthodox paraphernalia? Or in the paradoxical sites and looted history of the epic scenes on the Parthenon Marbles? Should we just discuss Australian Greek migration, the Greek economy and ancient Greek oracles sent to the blind seer? What could be common about these different elements in a practice that Stefanou summarises herself with terms like ‘agri-poethics’, ‘peasant surrealism’, ‘undisciplined snapshots’ or ‘offcuts?’ ii In preparation for this text, I spoke with Tina. iii Let me start where we ended the conversation: after her PhD, she wants to make the first Greek Western movie. Should I suggest to her that the interview has turned into a decolonial manifesto? Can I conjecture that she is the ‘Trojan’ artist whose process asserts a new discourse in the presence of absence?

How does this presence of absence materialise? In Tina’s works, there are no equine monuments, but we encounter moving elderly horses. There exists no traditional musical instrument as such, and yet her practice navigates sound production from hums to unusual vocal techniques. There exists no bagpipe or tsambouna iv but she is using the industrial dirt bike’s pipe as an instrument for her performance. In some of the works, the absence of Greek embroidery is evoked by the presence of a fascinating choice of decorative elements in the clothing and light. Present materiality and inserted paraphernalia refer us to ‘here’ with a negation of an imagined ‘there’ yet with reclaimed methodologies from over ‘there’.

The artist is here, very present and making at every step a hidden manifesto through the direction of the lens, the choice of attire, objects, animals, and sensual experiences. Bringing Greece outside the West, hybrid with the Orient, an Orient that is not asleep, that can resist old age, that can carve its ecological roots far and from a distance, past and beyond ecofeminist jargons. We are then in front of processual investigations that are wanderings, tricksters to infiltrate the gallery system and make changes of perception: perception of representation, speed and social class.

The title of this essay is borrowed from a poetry book by the late Palestinian writer Mahmood Darwish. v The translator of Darwish’s book into English reminds us that the presence of absence, ‘is a poetography of the poet who was destined to become a Trojan poet […]’. vi The ‘exilic spectre’, nostalgia and longing dominate Darwish’s language as they form the key force of his poetic process. vii The migrant position that Tina holds is different and does not dwell on a nostalgic past drowned in the imagined Greek identity or a loss of land. Her main research investigates an alternative economy for our current present here (in Australia) not there (in Greece). The exhibition at ACCA is an algorithmic diffusion of video works, centred around the unrepresented in the Australian economies: suburbia, regional towns, open farms, shutdown mines, and images that bring forward a reclamation of the working class aesthetics and political issues.

At the Hellenic Museum in Melbourne lies a fourth century BC pyxis (vessel), displayed in one of the smaller upper rooms. In the lower half of the red-figured pyxis, a winged Eros is seated with a mirror. Above, are a woman and a man wearing a helmet, guiding a chariot of four horses, perhaps indicating they are part of a traditional race or war. viii The chariot is confronted by Eros while horses are startled by a hare underfoot. There are horses, rabbits and love in Tina’s work. Did she take Greece out of the pyxis that Western culture has confined Greece to? A title with the word Greek is rare in her work: in There Is A Dead Rabbit Under the Greek Family Unit↘2022, Tina constructs an absurd supper scene highlighting familial dissonance during lockdown. In many of her videos, the horses are not racing, they are old, dying the way of the Orient and contemporary Greece as constructed in Western modern discourse. At ACCA, a blind man Matthew Cassar is racing with his dirt bike, a powerful machine that can go ‘off the grid, and off the road’, in Tina’s words. ix Where should we orient our listening: to the motorbike pipe in the room or rather the background technics bringing the economy into the musical instrument? Tina shares with me her encounter with the smell of petrol while blowing into the pipe. Isn’t the petrol to the dirt bike pipe instrument like the sheepskin to the Persian Tar? The latter probably emerges in an agrarian economy, while Tina’s conceptual choice of the industrial exhaust pipe speaks to an (oil) economy founded on pollution, and indeed, an economy of exhaust(tion).

In our conversation, we move from the economy of exhaustion to marginalised communities in Greece that played the Rebetiko on the tzouras. Rebetiko is a late nineteenth and early twentieth century Greek music that emerged among refugees and migrants coming from mainly what is called Asia Minor to urban areas on the ports of the Aegean Sea. x To write this essay, I have been listening to Rebetiko collections on Spotify. Tina interjects that the genre was banned as it didn’t fit the rules of Western music. The ethnomusicologist Dafni Tragaki explains how two different positions on oriental music led to the emergence of Rebetiko, its banning and spreading. Those in Greece who idealised European music, found in oriental notes and rhythms a lack of sophistication. Those of a small urban middle class longing for the Orient started writing about it. Thus, Rebetiko is born from a simultaneous protest against the nationalist negation of the Orient and the intellectual interest in finding the East in Greek identity. Perhaps what haunts Tina’s artistic approach lies in her recognition of the inevitable syncretism in Greek music.

To escape the inherited burden of Western fetishisation of the Ancient and the Westernisation of Greece, Tina looks to the old age (the ancient that is not dead or extinct), to the animal that has power but not speedy power that competes with steam engines, to those who may visibly have one prominent perceptual sense compensating for an absent sense (the blind, the deaf, etc). In Horse Power↘ 2019, Tina films elderly retired horses and sings for them. She designs for them crocheted attires with small attached bells and keys all around their bodies. The resulting sound, as they trot around the farm, becomes the sensual translation of their energy. Horse Power↘ is then an active visualisation of energy through both a relation between the decorative act (of a sonic attire) and the sonic. xi The sound of the title evokes the one-word horsepower, defined in the dictionary as ‘the power or rate of work of a horse in drawing’, or of an engine. xii In our fast-running economies, the old wise are not part of the productive formula. The intergenerational economic models often set the old as non-productive, relaxing after years of work and tax payments. Such models do not account for the invisible labour of the elderly or those who cannot afford to retire. What is the use of an old horse? If it is not in drawing carriages: how about speedy scenes of wars in Hollywood, a body suspended in the air for a traditional monument, or for a photographer trying to learn about shutter speeds? This is where to begin perhaps, in the fetishisation of the moving horse, Muybridge! In Hym(e)nals↘2022, young riders sit on top the ponies walking in the dark under a translucent veil, the lighting of the scene recalls painterly miniature, orthodox iconography and decorative costumes — nomadic with singing.

One of Tina’s sketches shows a screen with an old woman surrounded by cactus. The screen is suspended on top of the back of four horse legs: a representation of the moving image, perhaps. Tina starts with drawings to conceptualise her installation ideas. The artist cast the feet of Breeze, the oldest horse in the Jocklebeary Farm herd, to create sculptures for the exhibition at ACCA. The cast feet are made into different materials such as wax, salt, metals, and borax crystals designed to be touched. The process of this decorative casting emphasises the forgotten social roots of decoration rather than its reading in modernity as a superfluous, non-artistic act. The anthropologist Michael Taussig reminds us how in Greek Graphos is both to draw and to write.While discussing the relevance of drawing and image-making against the deficiency of the verbal, he describes his encounter with the Webster’s dictionary entry of the word ‘honour’ next to the word a picture of a horse’s hoof. ‘You can’t have much honour without a hoof. But a hoof without honour is fine.’ xiii A horse is a symbol of status in the Western culture. With this necessary condition of the hoof, or the horse, Tina enters the white cube to speak of social class and social status, to question what is worthy to see or to experience. The hoof and its decoration is the ‘Trojan’ insertion. Indeed, Tina is a Trojan artist, a double agent perhaps tricking us with a discourse around multispecies realities to bring forward attention to a variety of communities that are marginalised by the current economic system.

In 2015, at the Venice Biennale, I had the chance to see Maria Papadimitriou’s Why Look at Animals? AGRIMIKÁ. The artistrecreates a tannery shop in Valos that sells animal products. xiv The tannery shop represents a workshop, a site of traditional technical skills and labour, a site of exchange to sell products and a site of relations with animals. The viewer is invited to contemplate the scale of lost relations between humans and non-humans with longing poetics. We see different tools, animal skin, family photographs and shelves, like a relic of other shops forced to extinction. Papadimitrou’s approach brings an invisible dying economy to the gallery. From the term Agrimiká, one can extrapolate that the shop comments on what has not been coopted into modern urban ways of living. xv In 2015, Greece was still struggling with the aftermath of its 2009 economic crisis. During this crisis, the negotiations between northern EU countries and Greece highlighted the gap between the glorification of Ancient Greece and the contemporary ‘internal colonisation’ of the Greek political economy. xvi Greek writer and curator Iliana Fionaki states, ‘Imperialism, nationalism, and capitalism form the corners of a triangle built and sustained to this day by what I call the WWW (White Western Westphalian) order of patriarchy’. xvii

Set in Carnamah, a small town in Western Australia, Back-breeding↘ 2023, shows Stefanou collaborating with the community to make a natural wool costume for a John Deere 1985 tractor. Tina iterates that the politics of the community is different from hers, probably much more right-wing and nationalist. She prefers to attribute her practice as ‘socially endangered’ rather than ‘socially engaged’. The communal making of a monumental soft sculpture opened a frank discussion about class, the environment, patriarchy and other political issues. Similarly, in You Can’t See Speed↘ 2025, the blind motorbike rider’s politics diverge from Tina’s green leftism. xviii Far from political correctness, Tina relies on the power of syncretic juxtaposition to carve political proximity that allows the unheard and unrepresented to have a voice without longing for another time nor with a didactic political direction. The presence of absence is not a presence of loss but rather a presence of techniques and strategies from elsewhere, including the spirit of a syncretic (Greek) methodology. Although different in approach, Tina has learned some of these strategies from her mentor Alexandra Pirici. The latter staged a performance work Parthenon Marbles 2017at the Acropolis in Athens and Paris. Participants (including Tina) activated the site of KADIST in Paris and the Parthenon in Athens with their bodies, imitating poses from the Parthenon frieze scenes, de-monumentalising the temple, and directing the gaze to a different history: the presence of absence, the looting of Greece, its subjugation, to whitening its culture and ‘redistribution by taking’. xix The work attempts through the performing body to repatriate the looted marbles, emphasise presence in the presence of absence. The wool costume manifests as a trace of the long exchange with the community including non-performers, babies, disabled elderly and female rural workers. The presence in Tina’s work materialises beyond the human embodied performance and through the materiality of the wool costume and its celebrated monumentality as it covers an industrial machine.

In Greek mythology, Poseidon, the god of the sea invented the horse to attract the goddess of harvest Demeter. Can the horse embody the absence of the sea? In its creation, and its speed? When Tina says I would like to make a Greek Western, in the grammatical proximity of the two words ‘Greek’ and ‘Western’, she highlights the difference between the two. Greece is present and absent in the show. So are notions of sight, ability, labour, ageing economies, social class, polarisation, taxonomy, and algorithms.