SEDIMENTATIONS, STEFANIA ORFANIDOU & GEORGES SALAMEH

The exhibition SEDIMENTATIONS brings together, for the first time, two long-term, ongoing projects: Stefania Orfanidou’s CACHE and Georges Salameh’s LET US STOP AND WEEP. The two projects converge in their exploration of memory, oblivion, and the archive, focusing on personal and collective narratives connected to the Mediterranean. A place of encounter, movement, and exchange, where three continents meet and countless stories and cultural layers intertwine, the Mediterranean serves as both a geographical and conceptual space for the two projects. Photographs, documents, objects, texts, and audiovisual material become traces of memories that have been fragmented, lost, or remained unseen, yet can be retrieved and acquire new meaning in the present. Through distinct artistic trajectories, Orfanidou and Salameh revisit these fragments, forging new connections between the personal and the collective, the past and the present.

CACHE brings together photographs, videos, and audio works through which Orfanidou explores how memories are shaped by both lived experience and imagination. Taken throughout Greece and the Mediterranean, the photographs focus on small, intimate details of nature without identifying where they were taken. Like a digital “cache”, the work stores and retrieves fragments of memory, allowing the real and the imagined to intersect and acquire new meanings. LET US STOP AND WEEP, a participatory, narrative, and multimodal work that Salameh has developed since 2000, draws on experiences of uprooting, migration, and wandering across the Mediterranean. Personal and inherited photographs, documents, texts, objects, and audiovisual material form an evolving archive of family and collective memory. Inspired by the wanderings of the pre-Islamic Arab poet Imru’ al-Qays, Salameh approaches these materials as the “ruins” of an archive in the present.

The title SEDIMENTATIONS refers to materials that settle on the seabed, but also to what accumulates over time and in memory: experiences, images, stories, and cultural traces. Whatever has sunk may no longer be visible, but it has not disappeared; it remains there, ready to be brought to the surface. The Monastery of St. Francis, built during the Venetian occupation and once the site of the Chania Archaeological Museum, becomes an integral part of the exhibition, adding its own historical traces and layers of memory. SEDIMENTATIONS brings together materials, stories, and images detached from their original contexts and accumulated over time, inviting the past to resurface not as a fixed narrative, but as a field of new connections and interpretations.

SEDIMENTATIONS

Meditteranean tales of submergence and emergence

Stefania Orfanidou & Georges Salameh

Moni Agiou Fragkiskou, Chalidon 28, Chania
22 October – 7 November 2026
opening hours: 17:00-20:00 [Tuesday 3 November closed]
free entrance

Curator
Ioli Tzanetaki

Opening
Thursday 22 October 2026, at 18:00 – 21:00

Exhibition duration
Thursday 22 October – Saturday 7 November 2026

Venue
Moni Agiou Fragkiskou, Chalidon 28, Chania

Opening hours
17:00-20:00

Organization
Region of Crete

Support
Municipality of Chania
Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania

Collaboration
Chania Film Festival

Patronage
National Museum of Contemporary Art (ΕΜΣΤ)

Production organization:
MeMSéA & Chora Atelier

Architectural design
Chora Atelier

Graphic design
Blind Studio

Sound design
Dimitris Barnias

Lighting
Yorgos Bobolakis

Sponsors
AKEK Ceramic Industry
Manousakis Winery
Plakopoulou Elena Bakery
Balantinos Dairy
Kanaria Events Hall
Raw Sight Lab
Diacon
Dipethe Kritis

Communication Sponsors
ERT Chanion
Association FrancoHellénique de la Canée

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PARALLEL EVENTS IN THE EXHIBITION SPACE

Tuesday, October 27, 2026 / 18:15-18:45
WHAT SANK BECAME SEDIMENT
guided tours in French and Greek

At 18:15, there will be a guided tour in French by Georges Salameh in collaboration with the Greek-French Association of Chania, and a parallel guided tour in Greek by Stefania Orfanidou. This will be followed by a screening of THE SEDIMENTATIONS OF OBLIVION, a collection of three films by Georges Salameh with Greek and English subtitles, in collaboration with the Chania Film Festival.

Tuesday 27 October 2026 / at 19:00 – 21:00
THE SEDIMENTATIONS OF OBLIVION
screening of three short films by Georges Salameh
in collaboration with the Chania Film Festival

The films Maesmak (20’, 2008), Claw Machine (14’, 2023) and Hippodamia (17’, 2023) reflect on how we experience history in the present and the traces it leaves behind for the future. Through diverse and unconventional forms of expression, the three films bring to light stories of uncertainty, turmoil, and displacement, tracing uprooting and waves of migration. Through these, new destinies emerge and, in turn, flow into oblivion.

Following the screening, there will be a discussion with director Georges Salameh and the artistic director of the Chania Film Festival, Matthaios Frantzeskakis.

Thursday 29 October and Thursday 5 November 2026 / at 18:30 – 20:00
LET US STOP AND WEEP
narrative performance by Georges Salameh

LET US STOP AND WEEP, is a participatory and narrative performance of 50-60 minutes, as well as a multimodal exhibition. It brings together a body of works in the form of short and extended narratives, drawing on experiences of uprooting and migration. The work is inspired by the wanderings of Imru’ al-Qais, the nomadic king of an Arab tribe and poet of one of the “the Mu‘allaqāt (the seven famous ‘hanging poems’)” of the pre-Islamic period known as the Jahiliyyah.

LET US STOP AND WEEP consists of images, documents, archives, texts, audiovisual material and objects arranged on a central table and scattered throughout the space. All of these materials were either created by Salameh or inherited from his ancestors. Most of them do not participate in History. They have neither causes nor consequences. They are simply locked within their own reality and decay over time. In a sense, they constitute the ruins of a contemplative search for roots and wanderings across the Mediterranean.

Half an hour before the start of each performance the artists will give a guided tour at the exhibition space.
More guided tours will give the artists on Sunday 25 October and Sunday 1 November at 19:00.

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GUIDED TOURS TO SCHOOLS

between 12:00-13:00

Monday 26 October 2026
Friday 30 October 2026
Monday 2 November 2026
Wednesday 4 November 2026