work / memories of work

Overview

Filmed over ten years, ‘work / memories of work’ documents the last days of a tannery in the area of Eleonas, in Athens. The long, monotonous shifts of the tanners are set against a backdrop of work in the surrounding neighbourhoods – scavengers’ markets, old farmhouses, abandoned kilns, and people labouring away amid factory ruins. What emerges is a portrait of a place, its present image, and its histories of labour. Written on postcards which were never sent, the narration is a polyphonic poem with fragments of testimony, collective memory, ethnographic and literary works that traverse centuries: in ancient times, Eleonas was a vast olive grove; in the nineteenth century an infrastructural hub, and more recently an industrial zone.