Like Ghosts We Remain
An exhibition by Zoe Metra
text by Morgane Ortin
August, back to Athens
The streets are empty
We make way for others,
Those who like ghosts remain in the heart of the city
The sun gives them a face
Forgotten bas-reliefs with painful masks
We dare a glance that goes straight to the heart
at the corner of a street, dreams pooled on the surface
synthetic-
Like ghosts they remain
To keep us awake in the scorching torpor
A fire in the dead of night marks the entrance to another world
Where lying,
dreamers don’t know if one day they’ll awaken
Like Ghosts We Remain is born of these invisible but often haunting presences, of the spaces between reality and fiction that shelter beings living on the margins, and of the heat of August in Athens. This exhibition explores how we inhabit worlds – real, imaginary, forgotten – and how the imaginary can become a refuge from an unlivable reality. This exhibition is a point of escape. There’s so much to escape from.
Through films, photographs and installations, Zoe Metra, a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Lyon, draws imaginary spaces where boundaries become blurred. She builds narrative universes where the rules of the tangible world falter. Here you can take shelter. Zoe’s works are refuges for those who are out of touch with the world around them, and who scent their own inner darkness.