On the Neck, 2023
Experimental film.
A young Greek woman returns — in memory — to her father’s village, “Lemos.” An encounter with a childhood friend becomes the trigger for resurfacing memories of sexual abuse that had been buried for survival.
The film unfolds without external landscape. The narrative is constructed through the close-up of the protagonist’s eye and a Playmobil house — a fragile miniature architecture that becomes a metaphor for memory, childhood and containment. Through voice, light and sound, the story gradually emerges, moving between narration and subconscious imagery.
On the Neck operates as an interior excavation. The eye becomes both witness and archive; the toy house transforms into a psychic space where trauma is replayed, distorted and revealed. The work explores how memory survives in fragments — in the body, in light, in sound.
Duration: 15:44
Selected Screenings:
Pebbles Underground Film Festival, 2023
Written & Directed by: Vera Iona Papadopoulou
Performer: Antonina Vlouti
Director of Photography: Vera Iona Papadopoulou, Arina Romanova
Sound: Andrii Sichkovskyi, Vera Iona Papadopoulou
Editing: Vera Iona Papadopoulou
Metanoia, 2014
Experimental performance film.
Metanoia is a self-performance in which the artist becomes both subject and material of the work.
Created as an attempt to process grief following a death, the film unfolds as a performative investigation of mourning and its stages. Over six months, Vera Iona Papadopoulou recorded her psychotherapy sessions using a GoPro camera, transforming the therapeutic encounter into a site of artistic inquiry. In parallel, she developed museum performances and constructed a minimal outdoor environment — white walls on bare earth — where the body articulated states of fragmentation, denial, confrontation and reconstruction.
The film interweaves therapy and live performance as equal scenes. Filming operates as methodology: a means of containing, observing and transforming experience. Trauma is not narrated but embodied; grief is translated into gesture, duration and spatial presence.
Situated between autofiction and autotheory, Metanoia approaches identity as a structure destabilized by loss and reconfigured through repetition and performance. Mourning becomes process; performance becomes a framework for survival and transformation.
Duration: 15:00
Written & Directed by: Vera Iona Papadopoulou
Performer: Vera Iona Papadopoulou
Psychologist: Boris Gorodkov
Directors of Photography: Alexander Hänt, Stas Lebedev, Alexandros Koromilas
Waiting for the Sping, 2013
Video performance / endurance piece.
Waiting for the Spring emerged from a period of anticipatory grief — the unbearable suspension of waiting for the death of a close person.
The work explores waiting not as passive delay, but as psychological compression: a state of slow internal pressure, stretched between hope and inevitability. For 4.5 continuous hours, the artist remained motionless beneath a frozen sphere, performing for the camera without interruption. Time, weight and stillness became the primary materials of the action.
The frozen mass functioned as both physical burden and metaphor — a suspended season, a moment that refuses to move forward. Immobility became tension; patience became strain.
The final work condenses the 4.5-hour endurance into a 5:09-minute video. Rather than documenting duration in full, the piece distills it. What remains is residue — the density of accumulated time under pressure.
Waiting here is not inactivity; it is embodied confrontation with inevitability. The body holds what cannot yet happen.
Duration (video): 5:09
Live performance duration: 4 hours 30 minutes
Selected Screenings & Exhibitions:
Exhibition “Panopticon”, Bauman Moscow State Technical University – Palace of Culture
Special Program, 6th Moscow Biennale, Russia
“Trilogy ANAMONI”, Personal Exhibition, Gallery CAMP (Contemporary Art Meeting Point) Athens, Greece, Curated by Alexandros Koromilas
Concept & Performance: Vera Iona Papadopoulou
