Art in motion: Cinema Professor Ariana Gerstein to create pop-up exhibit at LUMA

On an Athens street in faraway Greece, clothes fluttered from lines strung above the buildings, dazzling bits of color against the blue sky.

Binghamton University Cinema Professor Ariana Gerstein was drawn to this intimate scene as she wandered through the Greek neighborhoods of Psirri and Thisseo. During the LUMA projection arts festival on Sept. 8 to 9, she will recreate it as part of an art installation tentatively titled “What We Bring.”

Gerstein is no stranger to the event, in which artists from around the globe project intricate animations on buildings in downtown Binghamton. During the inaugural festival in 2015, she created an interactive pop-up projection exhibit that invited attendees to make their own simple animations using Tagtool. Using three iPads and a projector, she gave visitors a quick rundown of the tool and set them loose to create.

“Many people of all ages participated, from children to older folks,” she said.

Her return to the festival this year is connected with a project funded by the New York Council on the Arts (NYSCA). While the project won’t be completed this year, NYSCA requires that she exhibit her work in New York state during the grant period.

“My project has involved research and filming in Greece using a variety of technical approaches, including filming with 16mm, a stereo camera and a gimbal video camera,” she explained. “It also involves some family history and work with two researchers associated with Kings College in London.”

Long term, she plans to create more than one film and possibly other installations connected with the project. In the meantime, LUMA seemed an ideal way to share her current footage. Festival organizers Tice Lerner and Joshua Bernard were receptive and even loaned Gerstein a projector.

Gerstein has relatives in Thisseo, part of a small local Sephardic community that may be slowly disappearing. The neighborhood is vibrant and ancient, a place where local people of varied economic strata mingle with tourists and newly arrived immigrants.

“It is a place where many layers of history lay exposed but not always recognized,” she said. “The Acropolis is visible and accessible from here, but other signs of national and personal history are also part of the landscape, including markets that look and are run in the way they have been for a hundred years, bullet holes still in walls from the terrible civil war begun soon after World War II, and places where my family lived and worked.”

The details are still being finalized, but she plans to recreate the clothesline that caught her eye between Maryam’s Mart and Sake-Tumi on Court Street, hung with items collected from local thrift stores. As the clothes shift and blow in the wind, they will serve as projection screens for images of Psirri and Thisseo. The title, “What We Bring,” refers to the connection we have to clothing as a locus of memory.

“People will not be coming to see my piece, but maybe they will find it while walking between the large building projections,” Gerstein said. “And I hope they will enjoy reflecting upon this softer, intimate space that refers to life on a street far away, brought closer.”