Myrto Vratsanou – free immersion notes

The diploma project "free immersion notes" is structured a non-linear “journal” of relocations, reflecting on hoarding and haunting, memory, digital and physical accumulation, being out-of-joint and scattered and the “oceanic feeling”. 

The story unfolds from the point of view of an unspecified character who has come unstuck in time and is training to adapt to the different timelines and dimensions (past, present, fictional, physical, digital), becoming amphibian and bodiless in the process. The narrative, fragmented in this way, thus coalesces into a kind of diving chronicle that merges the vocabulary and metaphors of free-diving with the experience of digital space.

At her family's home on Symi, Myrto Vratsanou collected stories about the practices and traditions of sponge-diving, on which the island's economy once relied. 

The film part of her fragmented narrative focuses on the surfaces and objects of the old house. Water as a carrier of stories is revealed in the corrosion of the oil-coated surfaces by the salty atmosphere of the sea. 

"The bigger and heavier the body, the bigger and heavier the stone. The deeper the body of water." The essay and installation objects arise from this relationship between body, water, air, pressure, weight and object, and function as fictional artefacts that hint at usage and the passage of time.

Film Soundtrack: YARAY (@Yara & Ghaith Qoutainy).
Design der Publikation: Matina Nikolaidou

Myrto Vratsanou (* 1994 in Athen) studied postgraduate Medial Arts (Diploma 2) at KHM from 2018 to 2022 with a scholarship from the Onassis Foundation.

Diploma Supervision: Prof. Dr. Lilian Haberer, Prof. Ute Hörner, Karin Lingnau.