Louiza Ntourou | Inside the museum

White pigeons flutter across the large square, chasing after a street lottery seller. Green parrots call indifferently from the high branches above. The sun gleams against the white marble stairs. From the canteen in the inner courtyard, the sounds of Greek pop music mix with the murmur of visitors enjoying ‘TOTAL’ yogurt from plastic cups. Nearby, three women take a cigarette break and exchange homemade treats. Stepping into the main hall, a child is riding a horse furiously, another one offers a sparrow to the sky, while a dog rests peacefully at its feet and the eyes of the Gorgon gaze toward the end of the corridor.

This is the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, founded in 1889, during the early years of Greece’s independence, a historical monument and a touchstone of national identity. Nowadays, the transformation of the museum is underway, in sync with the city’s rapid redevelopment. The Ministry of Culture has announced a major renovation that will significantly alter the museum’s layout and the visitors’ experience.

This project aims to adopt an observational approach and oral history techniques to document the living fabric of the museum as it exists today. Through interviews, archival and library research, on-site observation, and filming, Ntourou aims to capture the institution’s everyday life and the personal narratives embedded within it. Recognizing how physical spaces shape human interaction, the project will record informal encounters, untold stories, and the intangible heritage shared by museum staff and visitors. By integrating these accounts with a visual exploration of the museum’s architecture and atmosphere, the resulting film will offer both a documentary portrait and a historical record, preserving the identity of a cultural landmark before it undergoes significant change. It will serve as a testament to the museum’s enduring presence and the community it has fostered for over a century.

“Entering the museum, I feel a sense of reverence, as if I were entering a temple. Usually, I walk straight toward the images that are ‘mine.’ I keep telling myself that I should study the other exhibits too, observe them carefully, yet I constantly postpone it,” says Greek writer Yorgos Ioannou in a 1982 interview on ERT. Ioannou’s words reveal one of the many intimate and deeply personal connections that Athenians, along with countless other regular visitors, have formed with the National Archaeological Museum over time.

During my research residency at Onassis AiR, I began developing a film project about the National Archaeological Museum of Athens in advance of its forthcoming architectural transformation. My initial intention was to explore ways of depicting the current form of the museum not only because of my own longstanding connection to it, but also because I see it as a symbol and mirror of a city that has been changing rapidly in recent years. As my research unfolded through repeated visits to the museum, a central question emerged: what will I miss most after this transformation?

In trying to answer this question, I realized that each time I entered the museum, I instinctively made my way to its inner garden. This space feels unique within the city. It brings together local trees, flowers and herbs, funerary sculptures from antiquity, statues recovered from the Antikythera shipwreck, birds moving between branches and marble figures, fish swimming in a tiny pond, visitors from different backgrounds wandering in the space, and museum employees taking a lunch break or sharing a cigarette break.

The garden gathers together the deceased and the living, inside and outside, movement and stillness, sound and silence. These states seem to continuously shift into one another: a child offering food to a bird beside an ancient sculpture, a visitor momentarily echoing the pose of a marble athlete, a museum employee pausing in the shade. Everyday gestures and archaeological remains coexist within the same temporal landscape.

Entering the museum’s inner garden often feels like entering eternity. Within a few square meters of space, multiple timescapes coexist without hierarchy, and within this variety of ways of being in a space, it seems to me that nobody appears out of place. The garden becomes a shelter: for visitors, exhibits, plants, animals, memories, and histories. Because I understand shelter as something that is first felt and only later seen and recognized, I became interested in translating this sensation into sound.

During the residency, I began creating a soundscape composed of sounds I hear – or imagine that I hear – when I am in the garden. This process led me beyond my usual practice in moving image and into an unfamiliar artistic territory: the composition and layering of sound. Gradually, sound became both a method of research and a way of approaching the atmosphere of the garden. It also began to guide the film I aspire to create. Rather than documenting the museum as a monument, I became interested in tracing the subtle relationships that unfold within this shared space: between past and present, human and non-human life, permanence and change.

Through my residency at Onassis AiR, I came to understand more clearly the nature of my connection to the museum and the film emerging from it. The conversations, exchanges, and support offered by the Onassis AiR team, my fellow residents, and my mentor helped me recognize that the project is ultimately not only about the museum itself, but also about the forms of coexistence, care, and belonging that its inner garden makes possible within the city, and about the significance of such spaces in contemporary cities like Athens.