Created in 1994, the video Requiem pour le XXe siècle is part of the Angel Cycle commenced in 1985 by artists Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki. The point of departure for this cycle was a black-and-white medical photograph of a nude intersex individual with their eyes bandaged, [1] which Maria Klonaris discovered in her father’s records when she was still a teenager—her father was a gynecological surgeon and obstetrician in Alexandria, Egypt. Beginning in 1985, this photograph became the “matrix image” [2] out of which the whole cycle developed. The series of works involved were created in different media, including photographs, performances, installations, videos, computer animations, sound pieces, radio broadcasts, artist books, and theoretical texts.

Set to the insistent music of Greek composer Spiros Faros, the artists juxtaposed the figure of the Angel with images representing the two world wars, which they reworked and altered using optical and electronic techniques. The Angel is shown superimposed over scenes of Nazi military assemblies, destroyed buildings, and battlefields. The Angel is also shown as a body under attack, being run through by tanks or soldiers on horseback. A ghostly image, the figure is also transformed into a burning body, reminiscent of the book burnings in auto-da-fé. Later, it fades and gives way to bodies littering the ground, which the artists electronically adorned with flowers. As an immaterial body, the Angel ultimately serves as a surface for the projection of images of displaced people fleeing the war, fields covered with barbed wire, exploding shells, grieving mothers, and air raids.

With this video, Klonaris/Thomadaki created a real “prayer for the dead” for those killed during the different conflicts of the 20th century, as well as those yet to come. “A different and naked individual, their eyes covered, is assailed by the constantly repeated violence of war. As a wandering and immobile consciousness, confronted by events that explode before their extinguished gaze, the Angel becomes in turn an observer, a witness, a victim, a judge, a persecuted different body, burned knowledge, an irradiated body, a scene of memory,” wrote the artists.[3] A blind witness to the atrocities of war, the Angel symbolizes all the “dissident bodies” persecuted by the Nazis and other totalitarian and genocidal regimes. Through their presence, the figure also reminds us of the treatment imposed on intersex bodies by Western medicine in the 20th century, subjecting them to mutilation. From the heavens, the Angel gazes down on the horrors committed by human beings. Wearing a blindfold, the figure resembles Themis, the Greek goddess of Justice, and becomes a judge. Their covered eyes reflect our own blindness in the face of “a world we can no longer face.” [4]

Marie Vicet, January 2025

Translated by Timothy Stroud

[1] The presence of a blindfold in this photograph is derived from the ancient medical custom of covering patients’ eyes so they could not be identified.

[2] This concept was theorized by Edmond Couchot. For him a “matrix image” could be saved in memory, duplicated, transmitted or transformed using digital technology. For Klonaris and Thomadaki, the concept is linked “to their work on interiority and projection.” They employed this “matrix image” on different media within the same cycle. See Cécile Chich, “‘Tous les corps de mon corps.’ Le Cinéma corporel de Maria Klonaris et Katerina Thomadaki,” in Cécile Chich (ed.), Klonaris/Thomadaki, le cinéma corporel : corps sublimes/intersexe et intermédia (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), pp. 114-15.

[3] Klonaris/Thomadaki, “Archangel Matrix, Dispositifs méta-photographiques,” in Le Cycle de l’Ange. Archangel Matrix (Paris: A.S.T.A.R.T.I., 1996), p. 19.

[4] Marie-José Mondzain, “Frité et de l’écart dans l’œuvre de Maria Klonaris et Katerina Thomadaki,” in Marina Gržinic (ed.), Stranger than Angel: Disidentska telesa, Corps dissidents, Dissident Bodies (Ljubljana: Cankarjev Dom, 2002), p. 61.