TERRA FIRMA
TERRA FIRMA
PROJECT INDEX
PROJECT INDEX
Terra Firma:
Songs from Another Plateau, 2019–ongoing
How does culture evolve when its social context is eroded or absent altogether?
What defines a border — geographically, psychologically, and culturally? And how do we engage with tradition in an era where its role is both contested and transformed?
Or was tradition always something else entirely?
Terra Firma is a long-term artistic documentary project set in the Greek-Albanian borderlands. Since 2019, I have been working closely with depopulated communities, exploring how cultural memory, identity, and tradition evolve in spaces shaped by migration, economic decline, and political neglect.
This work challenges the exoticized narratives often attached to these regions — where tradition is either romanticized as untouched or framed as something rapidly vanishing. Instead, through sustained on-site engagement, I focus on how people continue to shape and redefine cultural heritage, how absence becomes a presence, and how borders function not just as physical demarcations but as lived psychological and social realities.
Using observational filmmaking, field recordings, and intimate personal narratives, Terra Firma captures the tensions between rootedness and displacement, between nostalgia and adaptation.