“This box is a small ark that stops time […].”
George Seferis, Days E.
The memories from the long-gone house where I once lived and memories of familiar and unfamiliar abandoned places triggered me to explore relationships through the artistic process; the home-residence relationship and the relationship between spaces and the people’s psyche, as it is imprinted predominantly after their departure, their long-term absence, with the instant effect of abandonment of these spaces.
In the presented painting installation, the personal experience is powered by the broader socio-political phenomenon of population movement, particularly the internal and external migration. I find that people who experience their removal from their experiential space, in a violent or non-violent way, leave behind something significant, their imprints associated with their memories and experiences.
The repercussions of abandonment on an individual level, primarily psychological, and a social level, are the subject of my research.
Through my wanderings in abandoned places in the broader urban web and areas connected to my personal history, I collect scraps and objects, which after semantic/ processing and through my artistic practice, acquire an abstract shape as they are placed in an installation as fragments of memory.
These images, which I gather from these wanderings, are the starting point of my storytelling in the paintings. As carriers of experiences, detached building materials play an essential role in the painting compositions. Through painting, the traces and imprints contribute to the expansion from the individual to the collective while allowing room for the observer when wandering in the installation to experience his feelings and perceive the experiential painting area of my doing.
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