An Inner Quest

Marina Olympios invites the immobile travellers that we are to follow her to a poetic journey, in a quest for images and sounds that she has captured around the world. She carried her camera on the remains of ancient civilizations and set her sights on the human silhouettes she met in the fields and in the cities, to make us look no further than the virginal whiteness of the sand of the Dead Sea and the rocks of her island to their smallest grain of dust.

Through her eyes, we enter the composition of matter, of the life that animates the stone and the fluorescence of colours, of the incredible beauty of forms that nature has forged over the centuries. She teaches us that the world is within the reach of the one who knows how to see. Time takes hold of us, insatiable dreamers in cramped rooms, to abandon us to the magical beauty of her images.

After having surveyed the world with a Rimbaldian feeling of drunkenness, she came back, like Ulysses from this long journey, to anchor herself in the land of Cyprus and to go and discover the riches of her lava soils and her ancestral stones. Attentive to the «correspondences» perceived by Baudelaire as being the key to the secret harmony of the universe where everything is answered, Marina found in the act of painting the natural substitute with the step the walker to capture on her canvas the wonders that her eyes have kept in memory.

Following Rimbaud the «seer», she allowed herself to be traversed by the images accumulated on her retina, to project then their sketch and their essence, until the alchemy of the colour operates on her canvas.

In her film, she takes another step and unveils the festering wounds that man did to our planet, exposing the horror of its public dumps. Like the child she was and remains through the eyes of her little girl who accompanies her, she poses a questioning look at the world to try to decipher its alphabet.

Her quest lies in the tradition of women artists who have paved the way to the inner voice of art. That of the creative audacity of a Camille Claudel who, as a child, was able to see through the fantastic shapes that Nature had sculpted in the rocks of the Geyn Forest near the family home, the very shapes of some of her sculptures.

It is conceivable that Camille Claudel would use, today, multiple artistic expressions and new technologies available to the artist to translate her vision.

In her turn, Marina Olympios took up her life to «manifest» her desire to express herself, and to make emerge in herself the buried sources of an inspiration that fate had covered with a screed of silence.

Through writing, painting, photography and film, Marina explores all these techniques to sing the original and fragile beauty of a world threatened by man, who turns out to be reckless and destructive.

It is an initiatory journey that takes us into the bowels of the Earth, to meet ourselves.

Jeanne Fayard, Specialist on Camille Claudel and author of the Preface of «Dossier Camille Claudel» of Jacques Cassar (Klincksieck, 2011) and of the biography «The passionate life of Rodin».