Notes from the commentary: The current multimedia project is a conceptual piece consisting of two parts: music and film. The elements and ideas of the concept are scattered throughout the whole project and invite the viewer/listener to fit them together in a multimedia jigsaw puzzle. In this project I decided not to score a film, not to compose music considering the limitations of the moving image medium but to follow the exact opposite route: Film was made to fill the context blanks and reinforce the connotations of music. Using a Greek folk song as my launching pad, I worked on a context and a composition level, using, later, both elements to form the image.
The current project could also be considered as an attempt to define and establish the Greek term ksenitia (ξενιτιά) through the use of a Greek folk song, my sound treatment and my compositional part on it. There is no literal English translation for the term ksenitia but the closest to the original meaning would be migration. Though it is often used to describe this phenomenon, the term migration lacks the historical and emotional connotations that the term ksenitia (referring to a foreign land) is charged with. Ksenitia means not only migration but also to be deprived of family, home and the feeling of familiarity as well as to experience the violent division of the family and the distance from the loved ones.
In some cases in the migration songs, bad news are delivered through ships, in other, through letters, even the wind, birds or dogs undertake to deliver the bad news. In this particular song, the man sends his own eyes to his beloved. The eyes have to find his beloved and explain to her the reason of his prolonged stay in the foreign land. Guy Saunier in The Folk Song: Songs of Exile quotes: ‘The prolonged remain of him [the migrate] in the foreign land despite his will and his hopes, whatever his fate and reason for this extension, was for him, his family and the whole of the folk society an unjust and inexplicable state… …:witchcraft was the only explanation’ (p.160-161, translation by the author). So, the eyes blame a witch, who’s power is even more strengthened by the fact that she is a descendant of another witch and is stated by examples of this power practiced on the elements of nature. She is so powerful that she can make the birds stop singing and the rivers stop flowing. A power of that range can only justify the non-coming back migrant.
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