This work is about a burned house and about the family who lived there before having to flee their country. It is not a unique story. Throughout human history there have been innumerable such burned houses and uncountable exiled families.
But what happens if the burned house was part of your family history? What if the people who lived in that house and loved that house were your own family? What if everything they had, including family photographs, was burned inside that house and those who survived the war had to go into exile? Even if this is a lost past, it is a part of your family history.
There were no photographs of that past left from the ashes of the burned house I am speaking about. Some 30 years after the Greek Civil War ended, when I visited the village together with my father for the first time, I took one photograph of the house's abandoned ruins. Now, many years later, inspired by readings of Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, I have decided to animate this house in my imagination as it was before its destruction: a place of protection, a shelter for daydreams.
I have placed my imaginary house inside an old cabinet. Like in Bachelard's writings, the enclosed space provides an intimate space for family history and memories. Of course, in my fictive house, the memories are a fiction, a personal mythology of the past.
I use the motif of blue, as in the titular work of my series: Blue Hands of Fiction; blue as the colour of introspection, of memory and forgetting, and of the depth of human psyche. Blue is the face of my Yaya, my paternal grandmother, whose image I never knew. Blue are the family members I had never chance to meet; blue is the house that fell silent.
To myself as an immigrant to this country and a daughter of an immigrant to my native country, exploration of identity and of the tension between memory and fiction inspires these pieces and much of my other work.