The Caryatides (2023)

Title: The Caryatides
Year: 2023
Category: video / essay / film
Duration: 14:12 min
Tech: digital video, HD, color, sound
Audio: Ukrainian
Subtitles: English

Written and edited: Anna Barbieri
Camera: Anna Barbieri
Voice-Over: Svitlana Anhelovska
Translation: Anna Kondratova, Maria Pylypenko
Sound Editing and Mastering: Sebastian Meyer

Förderstipendium Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien, AT.

Research Residence Grant Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Lviv, UA.

The Caryatides is an essay film about the “Zubra-Center,” a shopping and communal centre in Sykhiv, Lviv and its locally initiated (nick)name: “Santa Barbara”. Since its opening in 1994, “Zubra-Center” has been called “Santa Barbara” because the architectural design of the building’s facade features round arches, which bear a strong visual resemblance to the pictures of the opening theme of the American soap-opera "Santa Barbara."

The film approaches the building and its narrative through the reflection of a local resident. She talks about “Santa Barbara” - about the soap opera, the shopping and community centre “Zubra-Centre” and the nickname that transferred the soap opera to the urban space. She creates a fragmentary, personal, non-linear, individual yet collective story. In the film, the building is hardly recognisable as a dimly illuminated outline. The view and the story of the resident intersect with the protagonists of the soap opera. Together, they become protagonists of a profane historiography carrying the building’s narrative as invisible caryatides.

The Caryatides is part of a work series titled Santa Barbara.