The Archive

The contents of the Temenos archive — Gregory Markopoulos’s camera originals and projection prints, his papers and my own films and papers– remained in a Swiss vault from 1968 till 1993. This was the one fixed point in our nomadic and irregular existence. Following Markopoulos’s death in 1992, I asked Thomas & Ruedi Bechtler to provide a space for the archive, first in Zürich then in Uster. On both occasions, Daniel Schedler designed a temperature and humidity controlled space for the film material.
Gregory Markopoulos’s writings – his notebooks, collected essays and poetry, a diary in 52 volumes, and 30 volumes of letters – are an important compliment to his filmmaking. In addition to his own texts, there are circa one hundred and forty-four boxes of  clippings, articles, excerpts from festival catalogues, etc. that he collected to document the reception of his films, from the 1940s onwards.