Maria Anastassiou

Maria Anastassiou

Maria Anastassiou is an artist/filmmaker using analogue and digital media in moving image, social practice and curatorial projects.

Her work is informed by experimental ethnography and structuralist film traditions. She is interested in the form and application of the filmmaking process as an entry point into responding to place, historical narrative, and communities.

Maria Anastassiou (b. Cyprus 1982) is an artist/filmmaker based in London. She uses analogue and digital media in moving image, social practice and curatorial projects. Her work is informed by experimental ethnographic approaches to documentary and structuralist film traditions. She is interested in the form and application of the filmmaking process as an entry point into responding to place, historical narrative, communities, individuals and other artists. Many of her projects are collaborative and defined by an exchange with other artists and the public, across disciplines and presentational platforms.

Selected Screenings and Exhibitions: New Cinema Competition, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (2020), Way My It Did I Art Exchange Gallery, Colchester, Selection 08 Courtisane Festival, Ghent, Belgium (2019), Light and Dark (Park) LUX, London, Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC USA (2017), The Equilibrists Benaki Museum Athens, Contact Artists’ Film Festival Apiary Studios London, Negative Light Microscope Gallery, NYC USA (2016). Recent commissions include: New Geographies (2018), Bedford Creative Arts (2016, 2017), Creative Europe Program (2015-2017). She is a recipient of the Deutsche Bank Award for Art (2010) and an ACME Studios Residency (2017-2023).

Kleep toowit, klip klip, too-ow-wit

16mm film digital transfer / 08:00 min / 2018

The title refers to the phonetic vocalization of the Lapwing birdsong according to the RSPB Handbook of British Birds. The Lapwing is one of the most frequent visitors to the Rainham Marshes RSPB Reserve in Purfleet. The Reserve protects ancient, low-lying grazing marshland, re-purposed from the Ministry of Defence, historically used as a military firing range.

The film explores how this re-wildered pocket of nature is contained and consumed within different frames: optics, sound, architecture, security structures, science, taxonomy, culture and language, epitomized by the figure of the bird-watcher. Bird-watching acutely sharpens the senses, in order to have an observation in the present moment, often resisting the impulse to document and focusing instead on the practice of looking, listening and identifying.

The film is formed as a walk from day to night along the inner and outer peripheries of the Reserve, shot on colour 16mm film, using a hand-cranked camera. Situated on the edgelands between city and countryside in the transient landscape of the Thames Estuary, this is a place layered with traces of the ever shifting global narratives of empire, industry, commerce and migrations.

The sound is open-sourced from contributors to the online archive of world bird sounds xeno-canto.org With thanks to the Rainham RSPB Visitors and Staff.