A conversation with Sophio Medoidze, Sainsbury Scholar, in which she speaks about the work she has produced during her residency at the BSR from September to October 2024, ahead of the Winter Open Studios.
Visions of Medea is an experimental script to be developed during my residency at the British School at Rome. It explores the theme of Othering by tracing its representations from Roman sarcophagi reliefs to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea. This approach critiques how exclusion, displacement, and marginalization shape both ancient and modern narratives.
Central to the work is the mythological figure of Medea, not only as a character but as a narrative device, enabling the integration of multiple storytelling forms. Medea’s myth holds personal significance for me as someone who grew up in Georgia, where the region of Colchis—her supposed homeland—is rooted in local cultural memory. My own experience of displacement, together with how this myth has been interpreted, appropriated, and misused, has fuelled my interest in her complexities. Medea exists as both a figure of power and vulnerability: a naïve princess and a knowing witch, a frightened exile and a marginalized alien, a displaced traitor to her state and a “barbarian” saviour of Greece, a priestess of Hecate and granddaughter of the Sun. These contradictions reflect the fragmented nature of her narrative.
Rather than attempting to impose coherence onto this myth, I embrace its inherent fragmentation, resonating with fragmentation in my own filmography. Medea becomes a vessel for the “sense of not-knowing,” embodying the disjointed, layered experience of exile. Medea’s myth is a narrative of displacement: as an outsider, she embodies the anxieties of foreignness and betrayal, her exilic status is foregrounded by the Roman tragedians, such as Ennius (Medea-Exul) – he himself a poet in exile.
Pasolini’s film offers a lens through which I explore Medea’s spiritual alienation and the broader “corruption of the ancient world by neo-capitalism.” This interpretation speaks to the loss of cultural roots and traditions. I will spend significant time researching the archives related to the film.
In Rome, I encountered depictions of Medea’s story on Roman and Greek sarcophagi. These reliefs, always arranged in a horizontal sequence of four key episodes, culminate in Medea’s ascension on a dragon-drawn chariot—a rare and gentler interpretation. These visual narratives function as a kind of “proto-cinema,” demonstrating our long-standing inclination toward cinematic thinking. They also suggest different reading of the myth, one that centres transcendence and transformation rather than tragedy. This visual metaphor informs the experimental script’s treatment of movement and imagery.
Through this residency, Visions of Medea seeks to redefine the myth not as a fixed story but as a living, evolving narrative.
