Towards Vera, the Girl Next Door. A study on the essay film as a personal journey into a neighborhood’s archaeology

Within the context of the doctoral project ‘Towards Vera’, I will create an essay film and develop a moving image methodology in between documentary film and archaeological theory, the two main fields of my expertise. My research departs from a random encounter, the diary of a young woman called Vera, dating back to 1961, which I found in the streets of my neighborhood, in the center of Athens. Much like a contemporary archaeological find, this record of a girl’s everyday life will become the springboard for an inclusive and participatory film project on the history of the area of Kypseli, and thus on contemporary Greek life and urban culture at large. Since its urbanization in the early 20th century, Kypseli became a cultural hub in the 1960s and 1970s, while from the 1990s on, and through the crisis, migrant men and women moved in and established vital attachments to the neighborhood, making Kypseli a special case of cohabitation until today. Playing with time, approaching the contemporary as a terrain for the archaeologist of the future, my approach will be twofold. On the one hand, I will observe and document the lives of current residents. On the other, I will develop an auto-fictional character, inspired both by Vera’s writings and by my own autoethnographic notes in order to complete an essay film that moves between the realms of (auto)fiction and non-fiction.