Eleusina is a city of contrasts, caught in between its modern history of industrial evolution and its native myths about life, death, afterlife and rebirth. Intimately connected, and yet shrouded by the mists of time and human secrecy, ancient and modern vestiges appear within quiet and obscure sites, forming multifaceted identities that transcend time.

Papadopoulos’s visual narratives approach the land, the buildings and the inhabitants of the greater Eleusina district as elements that are at once distinct yet interlinked. Composed of visual and literary fragments – industrial architectural elements, the landscape, archival images, portraits, inscriptions – this ongoing project drafts a hypothesis on visual impressions of mythical embodiment through the unique case of Eleusina’s mystical cohesion between past and present. Sound and text are also incorporated through animated frames and poem fragments, as context for mythic meta-which can surface through the image.

So far in the project, human presence and social interaction have been subtle, as the work has been taking place during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, the human aspect is present through anthropocentric symbols and rituals within the social network of contemporary Eleusis. In prospect, the project documents the aesthetic function of mythic embodiment, by looking into Eleusina’s timelessness, as an ability to continuously endure its past as the dominant seed for possible futures.