What lives in the space between the stones and in the space cupped between my hand and chest? A tower or ruin of remembrance. With each swing of the hammer, the sound rises from the chisel and I cut into the image as filmmaker/stonemason. A rhythm marked by repetition and animated by variation; strokes of hammer and fist resound in the space, which the film creates. Emptiness gains a contour strong enough to be seen as more than image.

I had filmed the same tower on the island of Hydra for Winged Dialogue in 1967 and returned to it after Gregory Markopoulos’s death in 1992. I filmed also the surface of my chest, as it mirrored the tower, the doves, a loaf of bread and the donkey’s hooves.

When re-seeing a film years after its making, I sometimes find that a single image becomes emblematic. In re-seeing The Ground, it was the image of a floating cloud and the gentle sense of healing in its movement. I ask myself “What led me back to life at that moment and released me from grief?” The sound of a wave, the percussive double beat of the chisel against stone or the sound of the wooden Talando voiced a message as the darkening stones and sea turned towards dawn.