The Tamata Hill (2025)

Created as a prop for a key scene in You will only see a flash of light, Smaragda Nitsopoulou’s The Tamata Hill (You will only see a flash of light) draws on the Orthodox tradition of tamata—metallic votive offerings left by believers in hope of divine intervention. In the film, the sculpture appears as a towering, compact cone: a monumental mass of metal reflecting the overwhelming weight of collective prayer and grief. It features in a choreographed lamentation performed by women, highlighting how spiritual labor and mourning are often enacted through gendered, embodied rituals.


Presented in the exhibition, however, the sculpture’s form is altered—it is no longer opaque and impenetrable. Visitors are invited to approach and peer inside, revealing its hollow interior. This shift exposes the object’s emptiness, transforming it from a symbol of unified devotion into a meditation on fragility, absence, and the architecture of belief.


Its inclusion relates directly to research for a documentary on the 1995 Sorin Matei incident, exploring media spectacle, violence, and public mourning. As both a cinematic and sculptural object, The Tamata Hill probes the aesthetics of tragedy and the thin threshold between surface and depth, spectacle and truth, offering a critical lens on how we construct and confront memory.



Lament is, even if it calls for revenge, a structured answer to death, an answer of a community, and furthermore an attitude of the same community towards life. In the Greek tradition, this role was attributed to women. In the wake of death, it is women who hold the family together, who give voice to collective grief, and who act as intermediaries between the living and the divine.


During filming, the mound of tamata (votives) became an altar—not to saints, but to the collective weight women carry across generations. It linked the domestic, the spiritual, and the performative into a shared space of ritual, where endurance, memory, and resistance are rendered visible.


I invite you to enter this hollow hill. To stand beside it. To let these unanswered prayers define you.

The Tamata Hill (You will only see a flash of light), tin, iron, bronze, acrylic fabric, 2025