Lost Monument (2009), multimedia video installation.
Lost Monument, single channel film, HD cam transferred to Blu-ray, 16:9 Color, stereo. Duration 27min.
Lost Monument, Archival B&W film footage, and news clips in DigiBeta, both transferred on Blu-ray. Duration 1 min each. Source: ERT News Archives.
Series of 22 photographs each 19 x19 cm. Source: Megalooikonomou Archive.
Lost Monument (2009) is based on the story of the erection of the USA president Harry S. Truman statue in Athens in 1963 and its subsequent adventures. Since 1947, the American government, following the President Truman decision, initiated a program of financial and military support to Turkey and Greece in the midst of its civil war, a program that became known as Truman Doctrine, aiming at the elimination of the ‘communist danger’ and the soviet predominance in the region. The repeated attacks towards the Truman statue epitomize the public feelings of anti-Americanism in Greece during the cold war period.
Tsivopoulos combines photographic archives and original film documentaries, which depicting the transport, the erection, the violent removal and the terrorist attack against the statue in 1986, together with a new film. The photographs are presented in the form of museum exhibits. They are the indisputable, evaluated documents of the past, the visual testimonies of history. In his film though, History retreats in favor of an allegoric narrative woven around an unpleasant material discovery.