Danae Io, Seven Types of Dust (still), 2024.
On May 13, 2025, e-flux Screening Room and CCS Bard co-presented a screening of select works by Joyce Joumaa and Danae Io that was followed by a conversation between the artists moderated by the curator Ariana Kalliga, and by a Q & A with the audience. The transcript of this conversation was edited for the present publication.
Ariana Kalliga: Tonight’s screening program is titled The Sun Is Burning the Unspoken—a phrase that, as you may have noticed, appears in the first minute of the opening sequence of Danae’s film Seven Types of Dust. It reads, “On Thebes’ plain, the sun is burning the unspoken.”
Across both of your films, Joyce and Danae—shot respectively in Lebanon and Greece—the sun seems to function as a central metaphor and has a formal presence in your work. In Mutable Cycles II, Joyce, your camera is fixed on solar panels installed across the urban landscapes of Beirut and Tripoli following the 2019 economic collapse in Lebanon. Danae, the sun is felt in your film as an almost oppressive force, whether emanating from the aridity of the land or through the atmospheric haze. Starting with you, Joyce, could you speak about your decision to center the sun in this work, and what led you to focus on the question of solar energy in Lebanon?
Joyce Joumaa: I made Mutable Cycles II after completing a more cinematic work focused on the 2019 economic collapse in Lebanon, which led to a series of interrelated breakdowns. One of the most immediate was the collapse of the national energy grid and electricity system. That meant we began experiencing scheduled electricity cycles—limited hours of power distributed unevenly throughout the day. This came alongside the crash of the Lebanese currency, which deeply affected daily life.
The earlier film I made about this moment was called To Remain in the No Longer, which actually screened here at e-flux Screening Room not long ago.
With Mutable Cycles II, I wanted to zoom in on the energy crisis. I became interested in the rapid influx of solar panels across Lebanon’s urban landscapes, particularly in Beirut and Tripoli, where I live and work. In the absence of state infrastructure, people found ways to self-organize—installing solar panels across rooftops and balconies in an unregulated manner. That word—unregulated—is important. It speaks to how people are forced to improvise within a system marked by corruption and systemic neglect.
These installations began overtaking the urban skyline. I started thinking about how they visually and materially transformed the city and what that transformation might mean in historical terms.
Importantly, the film also overlays various types of footage. Maybe we can talk more about that later. But one thing worth mentioning is the animated footage of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which is accompanied by a text that’s adapted from a geographical narration of that orbit. I included it not just because the sun powers solar panels, but because I wanted to evoke a broader idea of historical cyclicality—the sense that crises in Lebanon don’t follow a linear progression, but recur, over and over again. The image of orbit is both literal and metaphorical. It’s about how certain structural failures return, reshaped, but fundamentally unresolved.
AK: That really connects with something Lukas brought up in his introduction, which is how these films capture certain histories that are difficult to narrate because they don’t conform to linearity. Danae, building on what Joyce just said, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the role of the sun in your work. In watching your films consecutively, especially Seven Types of Dust, I noticed you include several shots of solar panels as well. For those who may not know, following the economic crisis in Greece over the past decades, there’s been a surge in foreign investment in solar energy and wind farms—particularly in central Greece, including in Thebes, where your films are set. Could you expand on this?
Danae Io: Yes, I do think there’s a connection—both formally and conceptually—in how Joyce and I are thinking through history. Especially in terms of how history in a place doesn’t just move forward but seems to layer itself, almost palimpsestically. Crises don’t just follow one another—they coexist and accumulate.
Thebes, where my films are set, is a plain just outside of Athens, ringed by mountains. In contemporary Greece, the sun is often marketed as part of the country’s tourist identity—a symbol of leisure and escape. But I was more interested in its other side: how the sun feels for those working in landscapes not designed for spectacle, but for extraction—whether agricultural, bureaucratic, or infrastructural.
So yes, in my films, the sun becomes more oppressive than idyllic. It weighs on people laboring in these spaces, especially people on the move who are exploited as field workers. And as you mentioned, the solar panels and wind farms in the region are part of a broader extractive logic. They reflect economic restructuring and land repurposing in central Greece. A lot of former agricultural fields have been converted into solar farms, largely through foreign investment. While some energy is used domestically, much of it is exported, bringing limited benefit to the local economy.
What interested me was how this shift alters the landscape's meaning—its use, visibility, and memory. The sun, in this context, is not just a metaphor or a climatic force. It becomes implicated in the infrastructures of displacement, in the logic of profitability that erodes local forms of life. That friction between what the sun signifies and what it enables is a key tension in the work.
AK: Danae, in what you’re describing, I’m reminded of something the anthropologist Daniel M. Knight writes about—on how renewable energy initiatives in Greece have reshaped people’s relationships to land. In your case, you keep returning to Thebes, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe. And for both of you, it seems that a kind of return—to place, to footage, to memory—is central. Whether it’s in the form of multiple works shot at the same site, or as a principle of working with material captured in the field and revisited later—this idea of returning seems important. Joyce, could you speak a bit more about that relationship to place, and what drew you to the specific locations you revisit?
JJ: Yes—maybe for context, I left Lebanon eight years ago, initially to pursue my studies, and I’ve since been based in Canada. But over those years, I’ve returned to Lebanon every year—sometimes more than once. That pattern of return is foundational to my work.
I’m drawn to the way landscapes evolve—not necessarily in a progressive sense, but in how they shift materially and affectively. I’m interested in that tension between what’s tangible and what’s felt. The landscape is always changing, and each time I return, it meets me in a new way. As an artist, those encounters produce new readings of the place—new ways of seeing Lebanon.
AK: So there’s return in the literal sense, but also a kind of navigation of distance, especially in how images circulate, how news is transmitted, and how history is received through media. In Mutable Cycles II, there’s a strong sense that history is mediated through interference, fragmentation, or even a failure to transmit. Could you talk a bit more about how that shaped the work?
JJ: Yes. My relationship to the 2019 crisis in Lebanon was largely shaped by watching it unfold from afar. I was in Canada at the time, watching the events live on TV and following the headlines from a distance. That distance, that inability to be there physically, really shaped the temporality of the work.
Mutable Cycles II is structured around a rhythm of on and off—mirroring the electricity outages experienced during the crisis. The work also exists in a six-channel version, which is what appears in Ariana’s exhibition. The idea was partly to echo the physical grid of solar panels, but also the visual grid of televised news coverage. During the protests, footage from different cities appeared simultaneously across multiple screens. The six-channel installation tries to mirror that format—each screen playing news segments from simultaneous protests across Lebanon.
That’s how I experienced it, through fragmented broadcasts, partial images, moments of delay. I couldn’t ignore that distance in addressing the ongoing energy crisis. These protests certainly marked a critical moment when the system began to unravel. It was a turning point that had to be acknowledged.
AK: Danae, you also have a very particular approach to image-making, and I’m interested in how you employ images in ways that reflect on their historical use—particularly the way you research and examine the conventions of British imperial cartography or archaeological surveys of Thebes. I’d love to hear more about that research and how it informs your work.
DI: I think there’s a recurring interest in my films in how images have historically been used to construct ideologies. Especially in the context of archaeology or topography and how certain visual forms served colonial or imperial narratives. These images often carry with them assumptions of neutrality or objectivity, but they play a strong role in defining territory and identity.
Thebes, in particular, is a place that holds a powerful place in the ancient Greek imaginary. Through numerous mythological and historical texts—especially tragedies—it’s often cast as the opposite of Athens. If Athens is framed as the ideal city-state, Thebes is its ‘other’: the city of excess, violence, and crisis. This orientation continues to operate today in how the region is viewed.
There’s also the fact that Thebes borders Attica, the broader region of contemporary Athens which has similar expanse to the Athenian city-state in classical Greece. In Seven Types of Dust, the frontier itself becomes a symbolic space. The film follows two U.S.archaeologists scanning the landscape with drones to map the ruins and be able to access the archeological past. I’m interested in how that relationship between land, myth, and scientific “survey” produces new psychological landscapes—how it continues to shape not only how the place is seen, but how it’s lived in.
AK: And one thing that stood out while watching your films is the role of text. There’s a strong poetic structure framing these images. Each scene feels like it’s unfolding beside or through a line of verse. Could you speak a bit more about that process and also your collaboration with the poet and comparative literature scholar Stathis Gourgouris?
DI: Yes, of course. The three films are part of a longer-term series, and the texts across them all follow a consistent poetic approach. I began working on this series in 2020, and around that time I came across Stathis’s book Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (1996), which explores how national imagination is shaped in a dream-like form that envelops the social but also the way the Greek ideal has been used by European colonial powers to anchor the West to the past. I had been reading his work, and we ended up meeting. We’re both from the same region of Greece, and we had been moving through some of the same landscapes throughout our lives to reach our hometown, always passing through Thebes—though with generational distance and different rhythms. That felt like a shared entry point.
As I kept returning to Thebes and gathering images, notes, and fragments, I began sending some of them to Stathis. We started an email exchange where I would send a still or a scene, and he would respond with a poem. I’d then respond with my own writing, and that developed into an extended correspondence. It became a kind of back-and-forth writing process, and eventually, the film texts emerged as a collage of these exchanges. In the finished works, the script is built out of excerpts from these poems—some written by me, some by him, and others collaboratively shaped. So the on-screen text isn’t authored in a singular way. It’s more of a shared space where image and language are constantly in dialogue. In both Seven Types of Dust and Sprouts of a Dragon’s Teeth, I was trying to think about the function of poetic text not as a commentary on the image, but as a kind of alternate axis—where the line breaks or rhythms structure the viewer’s perception of the film. Almost like editing between books or verses, as much as between frames.
Audience Member: I’ve been thinking about cycles of crisis and how people respond to crisis. For instance, there’s a stereotype that Lebanese people are especially inventive during times of crisis. I’m sure that’s true of many people, but since you mentioned that the original six-channel installation drew formally from the grid structure of the panels, what stood out to me is your reference to them as a kind of innovation. Could you talk a bit more about that—your reading of them as a sign of the crisis, but also the creative response to it, as part of a larger cycle?
JJ: Yes—thank you for that question. I think there are a few different layers to this: the affective, the tangible, and the social. What you’re pointing to really touches on the social. I want to highlight self-organization as a form of response. Historically, self-organization often arises as a necessity within particular political landscapes, where people are compelled to create alternative systems to what the state has failed to provide.
In Lebanon, that response took many forms—solar panel installations, informal infrastructures, or alternative economic systems. One example is the Western Union remittance economy, which at one point became a primary means for people to access money, as banks were freezing accounts or restricting withdrawals. I mention this because I once created a fictional currency exchange counter for an exhibition that engaged with this phenomenon.
So yes, I’m very interested in responses to crisis—not only in terms of data or symptoms, but in the lived, subversive ways people navigate and resist these conditions. It’s about how people reclaim agency within collapse.
AK: The question you raise relates to a key issue I see in this work. Underneath the still shots of solar panels lie larger questions of scarcity, the further fragmentation of Lebanon’s energy systems, privatization, and, indeed, the frequent romanticization of people’s responses. These themes are also addressed in the exhibition’s catalog, specifically connected to the different ways we might interpret the role of the solar panels: are they a form of self-organization, a sign of further fragmentation, or, as in Danae’s work, a tool of continued extraction and foreign investment?
This line of thinking also echoes a recurring observation in infrastructure studies: that infrastructural breakdown frequently results in moments of collective improvisation and self-organization. Insofar as solar systems untether people from their reliance on the state, do they represent a new form of citizen organizing, or do they ultimately perpetuate the state’s absence, as citizens are forced to make further concessions? This is one of the central tensions I see the film working through.
Audience Member: Thank you very much for sharing. It was really compelling. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of soundscapes—especially urban soundscapes—while watching your films. I was curious whether you had any reflections on how you use ambient sound to drive the narrative. It really struck me how seamlessly the sound carried the pieces.
DI: Yes—thank you for the question. I think that’s a really important point, and it’s not often discussed. For me, the sound of cicadas in particular became a way to convey the intensity of the heat in Thebes. It’s something constantly present, but at a certain level it becomes oppressive, almost uncomfortable. I was interested in using that tension, amplifying it, and then punctuating it with moments of silence or darkness, especially at the beginning.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say the sound operates as a signifier, but it becomes a formal element that carries the film’s emotional and physical register. I was thinking about sound as another mode of movement—something that creates its own rhythm and tension, returning again and again to the cicadas, to their overwhelming presence, and pairing that with shifts in color or texture on screen.
JJ: I relate to that as well. In my work about the crisis in Lebanon, I’ve been interested in how state corruption infiltrates the mundane—particularly within the household. The household has long been an anchor point in my thinking about the everyday. So it was natural for me to construct a soundscape from that space, not just the domestic interior, but its relation to the street. The sound moves between these zones.
Just as I’ve spoken about the narrative potential of the image, I think sound also carries a narrative function through its own design, its own compositional logic. It’s not only illustrative; it tells something on its own.
Audience Member: I kept thinking about the legacy of landscape cinema to your work. Say, Straub-Huillet, for example. One of the things I’ve always appreciated about them is their insistence that a political film has a political form. This brings me to my question: both of your works seem to move between different presentation formats. Danae, I understand your film is made for single-channel screening, but I also read you’re working on an exhibition. And Joyce, this work exists both as a single-channel and an expanded installation. It made me think about the importance of form for your works and how landscape cinema gravitates towards new forms beyond the movie theater.
JJ: I agree that both of us—not to speak for Danae, of course—have chosen to work with landscape as a charged, political space. And it’s perhaps through landscape that form can emerge, rather than developing a filmic form that merely accommodates landscape.
In your comment, I hear echoes of structuralist filmmaking and questions of montage. But I think in our case, we’re looking at what landscape itself offers as a form—what its visual poetics enable. The formal dimension arises from within the landscape rather than being imposed upon it.
DI: Yes, it’s interesting to think through how form develops out of different ways of looking. For me, it’s important not to dictate how the viewer should engage with the image. There’s a responsibility in creating space for different modes of attention—not forcing the viewer into one fixed position.
I also work in an exhibition context. I currently have a solo show at Akwa Ibom in Athens that presents the third work in the series, titled Recording Angel (2025). The work was shot in and around Thebes, and is structured around the experience of passing through the city by car. There’s a voice in the film—but not a voice-over. It’s a radio program that plays in the background—a scripted broadcast embedded within the scene. In the exhibition cut, I was interested in creating a space where the film loops continuously, with no clear beginning or end. Viewers encounter it at any moment, and it’s built to hold that fragmentary experience. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way moving image works are shaped by the space of viewership.
AK: To build on that question, when I watch your films, I oscillate between seeing the landscapes as politically charged and feeling a kind of nostalgia, which may come from my own distance from these landscapes. Thinking specifically about political form, Danae, could you talk more about the function of radio in this latest work, and how you see it operating politically?
DI: The radio broadcast in Recording Angel follows the format of the Third Program, a cultural station on Greece’s national broadcaster. It plays classical music and intellectual programming—discussions, literary readings, cultural news. I was drawn to radio because of its connection to the Greek state—and its entanglement with the crisis. In 2013, during one of the most intense moments of the financial crisis, the state abruptly shut down both national television and radio. For several days, the screens were black, and the radio frequency fell silent. That absence had a strong political resonance for me. So I wanted to bring the state narrative into the film—not to endorse it, but to question it, and to stage its reappearance in a different form. Radio, in this context, carries layers of meaning: it signals authority, cultural memory, the seeping in of national narratives into the everyday and the fragility of public infrastructure.
