The Garden

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This series of drawings comprises preliminary studies

and keyframes for a narrative stop-motion animation that explores the city of Athens as a site of utopian projection—viewed from both German and Greek perspectives.

Set during the period of Neo-Classicism around 1830, the story follows a romantic tragedy about unfulfilled love between the young German architect Schindler and a Greek itinerant actress named Marika.

Marika is part of a traveling theatre troupe that has settled at the large construction site of the nascent new city of Athens, where they perform to entertain the workers. In the play she performs, she portrays the wife of a master builder who must be sacrificed so that his building can be completed. 

Schindler, who is responsible for planning and directing the construction of the city, falls in love with her. But his feelings remain unreciprocated—or are, at the very least, 

misunderstood. While Schindler succumbs to his longing and descends into madness, Marika ultimately becomes the victim of a jealous fellow actor who murders her. Both characters fail—each in their own way—due to a misreading of signs, a fundamental incompatibility of their worlds.

The animation functions as a parable: the desire for something grand and utopian collapses under the impossibility of genuine encounter.

Classicism, which appears to connect both sides and serves as a national narrative inscribed into the urban fabric, fails here to achieve the universality it so confidently proclaims. Instead, it becomes a hinge between two incompatible cultural narratives 

and projections.

All spaces of the story unfold within the architectural drawings of Friedrich Schinkel

—his historical plans become the stage for this fiction.


At this point, however, solitary drawings are also presented that formally and substantively belong to it.