• Projects

The Truth is in the Soil

The Truth is in the Soil is a 5-year exploration of grief as an elegy to my father and the dying tradition of mourning in Greece. After my personal loss, my own grieving process became the lens through which I investigate the collective mourning in Greek society, the intersection of ancestral rituals, private trauma and the passage of time.

Further inspired by the last communities of traditional mourners on the Mani Peninsula of Greece as the doyennes of a dying tradition, the work incorporates a new kind of subjectivity, intimacy, and criticism, exploring mortuary rituals as a way of humans adapting to death. In Greece, the so-called Moirologia (moira translating as ‘fate’ and logos as ‘speech’), can be traced to the choirs of Greek tragedies, in which the principal singer would begin the mourning and the chorus would follow. Archeological evidence, present clearly that the tradition goes back to the early Protogeometric period (11th BCE) of the Iron Age and possibly beyond.

The Truth is in the Soil aims to look at how the work of mourning contextualises our modern regimes of looking, reading and feeling with regards to the subject of death in Greece today. In the process of documenting photographically the mourners’ communities, my readings and inspiration from the ancient Greek laments as gradually vanishing historical marks, made me question to what extend we see ourselves as subjects of history and how mourning can become a cultural experience of loss today. The aging of the villages in the region and the difficulties during the current economic woes besetting the country seem to be part of the reasons for the disappearance of the dying art of traditional mourning.

I gradually became interested in how space can be indissolubly perceived and represented in the process of reworking memory and negotiating the boundaries of grief in my work. The idea of the silhouettes in my images started to influence the sequence of portraits that followed. While constructing the final pieces, shot with Zenza Bronica SQ-A, I experimented by post-editing my film negatives and playing with inverted light and shade, relief and contour, exploring the inherent recognizability of the figures’ outlines.

Through both manual and digital processes, I began adding layers to what had been documented as real, rerouting the viewer through existing and imaginary spaces. There is a versality throughout the imagery, shifting from black and white to colour, the abstract to the figurative.

Gradually Greece transformed into an imagined homeland being a place one knows outside of memory; a land of curiosity where death is an encounter through family, religion, mythology and the self.

In turn, the human figures of the female mourners transformed into the landscapes themselves, functioning as a passage between sheltering something from death and establishing with death a relation of freedom. Ultimately, the final works act as a visual representation of the gradual and irreversible loss of the departed in the mind of the living, and simultaneous reconstruction of memories.