Ioanna Sakellaraki is a Greek visual artist and researcher. 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.

Last week's panel discussion @photovogue on magical approaches to documentary photography reconnected me to the foundational concerns of my work "The Mark of a Terrible Sun" (Melanesia 20022-ongoing) attempting to draw an intimate portrait of the disasters that have been lived in and haunted these places as well as the ones that keep on happening and are yet to come. 

I began working on this series when I could not anymore deal with the disastrous discoveries in my family archives. Drawing from the double indexicality of photography placing us both outward to the world and inward towards ourselves, I started thinking outside of/from that family drama and questioning origins and ends of the disaster as a term that becomes itself the shifting debris sustaining the fear. The immemorable that is a fugitive encounter. An interrogation perpetually recommenced as a changing fiction that marks its repetition in history.

Between 2022-2024, I travelled to Melanesia following a series of volcanic eruptions, and I began exploring the southwest trench of the Pacific Ring of Fire.Stretching around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, this circular ring of disasters is a 40,000- kilometer zone that includes roughly 90% of all earthquakes and 75% of all active volcanoes across the globe. 

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.

I look forward to continuing working towards the next stage of realisation of the series while preparing the first Solo Show of it @hillvalegallery next month!

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