The Foundation continued its long support of the Fulbright Foundation’s scholarship programme for Greek artists who wish to train in the United States of America and broaden their knowledge and professional contacts in fields like visual art, creative writing, music, theater, dance, cinematography, photography, and digital art. The scholarship supported by the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation for the academic year 2021-2022 was awarded to Natasha Blatsiou, who conducted research in the fields of documentary & media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Open Documentary Lab, Cambridge, MA.
Natasha Blatsiou is a freelance writer and documentary filmmaker based in Athens, Greece. She was a journalist and editor for Kathimerini media group over a decade and the deputy editor and co-creator of GREECE IS editions.
For the last five years, Natasha Blatsiou has used traditional documentary and journalism tools to understand the potential of telling a story in the digital era through co-creation and interactivity.
At the MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL), she conducted research on new documentary forms with a particular focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling, working with technologists and scholars from around the world.
This work-in-progress documentary entitled Unwritten Land has taken the form of a cross-media project that weaves an intimate portrait of the highlands of Agrafa and their mountain communities as they are confronted with an unprecedented threat: the construction of a massive wind farm across the untouched mountain range. This irreversible transformation of the landscape becomes the motive to explore the relationship of three generations to their land. The project aims at interweaving the visible and the invisible, the physical and the digital, the intimate and the political, and creating bridges between the disconnected narratives around the urgent controversy concerning the protection versus ‘development’ of the natural world.
Photo credit: Natasha Blatsiou
