Ioanna Sakellaraki is a Greek visual artist, creative practice researcher and prospective Fulbright fellow. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people.
A sea-slug wonder in two, 2025
Tales of Sea, Lust and Death is a trilogy developed with and against my late father’s maritime archive found after his death. It is narrated through my intimate journey between my homeland Greece and my current place of residence Australia drawing from archival ephemera and maritime themes to reveal my uneasy process of narrating a family secret.
In Part Two, ‘Nine Years on the Lizard Reef’, I dismantle a family lie which leads me to the discovery of my half- brother, by my father and his ex-wife, whom I have never met. Diving deep inside the oceans of the forever unknown and continuously reformed in my family history and creative practice, I find myself on the faraway coral islands of the Australian Great Barrier Reef, where I work on site with my father’s reptile skin collection and stories of deception and camouflage of marine wildlife in this other part of the world.
#ioannasakellaraki #archive #archives #archivalimage #practiceasresearch #researcher #collage #photoproject #seaslug #barrierreef #Australia #maritime #otherworldly #death #memory #homeland #collageart #collagemag #ArtResearch #contemporaryartist #oceans #sailing #deception #mediterranean #marinelife #conceptualart #alternativephotography #familyarchives #wildlife
Time to return
to the house with no doors
where the sky drinks dust
and the people remember
with mouths full of ash
and eyes stitched shut by old songs.
Greece, soon x
#greece #homeland #analogphotography #backhome #ioannasakellaraki #documentaryphotography #portraitphotography #lifeofanartist #travelhome
These days, I find myself thinking about the fires ravaging Greece, disasters close to home, while simultaneously working on images of catastrophe unfolding across the Pacific. This dual engagement with destruction draws me toward the notion of the absolute disaster: a threshold where devastation converges with the absolute knowledge of its inevitability.
How might one capture this transitional stage of hope, anticipation and widely shared sense of crisis?
The image of the end resists finality. It becomes an interspace, a suspended interval between prediction and fiction. What is the artifice that lays behind this reality of terror?
#workinprogress from The Mark of a Terrible Sun, a photographic exploration of the lands and people alongside Pacific Ring of Fire, the world`s most seismically and volcanically active zone.
#themarkofaterriblesun
#papuanewguinea #analogphotography
#practiceled #ioannasakellaraki #disaster #contemporaryartist #Pacific #volcanic #volcanoes #png #lava #catastrophe #creativepractice #landscapephotography #fineart #loss #death #resistance #earthquake #tsunami #death #pacificislands #melanesia #documentaryphoto #fires #greece #wildfire
The volcanic island of Savo, northern tip of Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, 2023
From The Mark of a Terrible Sun reposted @deardavemag as part of last year`s Fellowship shortlist.
Disasters are the absolute event of history and any knowledge we have of them is built around, with and against the marks left behind them. The Mark of a Terrible Sun is an intimate portrait of the lands and people of the Pacific Ring of Fire, the most seismically and volcanically active zone in the world.
Stretching around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, this circular ring of disasters is a 40,000- kilometer zone that includes roughly 90 percent of all earthquakes and 75 percent of all active volcanoes across the globe. The first part of the project focuses on the lands and people under the shadow of the volcanoes situated on the southwest trench of the ring and more specifically on the part of the region of Melanesia including Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, seeking to investigate how these ongoing disasters, as witnessed through archives and re-lived today, can shape a culture of resilience shared amongst the Melanesian communities impacted.
Photographed under the lava and ashes of past and ongoing volcanic activity and the historical remnants of the Pacific war in the region, the work is primarily concerned with the obscure traces of the disaster as an interspace dealing with ideas of destruction and survival and the exploration of heterotopias that might creatively synthesize new composites and assemblages of interpretation. In this sense, the images blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction reflecting upon the possibilities an expanded photographic practice can offer in relation to the disaster as the prompt for future scenarios positioned in the gap between historical knowledge, presentation, the image and narration.
Discover the project on my site via Link in Bio
#deardavemag
#themarkofaterriblesun
#volcanoes #landscapephotography
#fires #lava #disasters #png #solomonislands #Pacific #disasterrelief #memory #destruction #catastrophe #melanesia #ioannasakellaraki
