Nautilus: The Chambered Self

This unique artefact manifesting as a two-volume artist book serves as an archive of my spiraling attempts to activate my father’s secrets in his archive, articulating a space marked by the intimacy and fragility that my otherworldly encounter with them opened up in my art practice.

When a specimen of Nautilus pompilius (deriving from Ancient Greek little sailor) belonging to a family of ancestral cephalopods was discovered in a cardboard box, part of my late father’s archive marked as ‘Specimen: Other’, stored in our Athenian apartment’s basement, little did I know that its vessel would allow for another dive in the muddy waters of my research with its fossil as an active body of history embracing its dynamic, deep and dark spaces.

Holding it for the first time reminded me of the way the mollusc emerges out of its shell in an embryonic form and it unavoidably made me dream about the ways that my project’s fragmentary lives could be transforming between its geometrically refined structures.

Questions around how to engage, dismantle and transform this work’s multiple spaces, inspired the first version of the artifact that is primarily concerned with ideas on repetition, fallibility and fragmentation of the archival, material and symbolic histories involved in my making.

Drawing from the natural formation of a pearl taking place when the oyster’s invasion from the outside triggers the formation of the nucleus-to- be, my making echoes another ‘shimmering’ formation in the archive of my father; the shaping of Anna, his, unknown-to-me, ex-wife with the pearl necklace; the ‘punctum’ of all ruinous discoveries about a family I’ve never met. Staging the above image of both disaster and wonder has been a dual act of performing a history of the natural world that echoes the circle of evolution from one state to another while producing an analogy on the dichotomous boundaries of inhabiting and invading the archive of my late father, in which the first ‘Mother of Pearl’ (also referred to as the pearl’s nacre) was encountered.

With Nautilus’s nacreous microstructure of its outer shell and chambers, referencing The Seven Circuits of a Pearl, as Nautilus itself is pearly (when the outer layer of its shell is removed, its pearly shell is revealed), I have drawn analogies between the personal and the historical, the secretive and the legible, all spaces within the archives I have thus far explored.

Nautilus listens to, and re‑sounds, the inherited, obscured and suppressed voices within my father’s archive. By giving form to the truth of another family he had and concealed from us, the artefact becomes a way of voicing what was previously unspoken. Stitching its body parts together, this is a story of extraction and (self-) sacrifice told through the fragmented anatomy of Nautilus in a language that connects in painful fragments. An archive of the archive, Nautilus is now housing the gravity and light of my (un)broken interplay between archives, pearls and disasters; it is a subjective interphase on which my images are projected not as transitory encounters but as the indelible marks of the fragment.

The two art books comprising Nautilus: The Chambered Self are unique editions under the titles:

Fragment A, The Seven Circuits of a Pearl [Between 7 sets of labial tentacles and a spadix], 2025, sliced Nautilus pompilius shell from my father’s archive, 28 photographic and mixed media artworks from the series, fine art paper, perspex, silk thread

[A spiral of tissue lined with 28 tiny teeth], 2025, Internal spiral of Nautilus pompilius shell from my father’s archive, 28 fragments of fictocritical writing, fine art paper, perspex, silk thread, clothbound panels, debossed labyrinth motif with golden foil

They were lastly exhibited at the Museum for Photography in Berlin as part of ‘Surrender to the Dreamers’ Exhibition organised by Analogue Now as part of the European Month of Photography (EMOP) in April 2025.