2022
Mnemosyne

Leather weaving and dye sublimation

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The title of the project 'Mnemosyne' takes its name from the goddess of memory and the mother of the nine Muses. Unlike Mnemosyne's absolute control and authority over memories, however, the project interprets memory as a (dis)encounter with a fractured past beyond our reach, a place, and no place for practices of meaning creation. I explore these questions from a personal perspective, focusing on the practice that perhaps best encapsulates the process of making meaning out of the interstices of a fractured past, namely forced migration.  

 

My great-grandparents were forced to emigrate from Istanbul (Turkey) to Volos, the city in Greece where I was born, due to the Asia Minor crisis. I choose leather as my primary medium because my great-grandfather used to trade it and because it is a surface that evokes touch, a sense that unites us while keeping us apart.  Working with a collage of images from the National Archive Centre in Volos, I separated the images through laser cut and combined them again with the technique of weave, creating the sense of over layering and exploring the interplay between vivid and fractured memories, between touch, disruption, and creation of meaning. 

 

The fact that the ink gradually fades on the leather also evokes the impossibility of definitively retaining our memories and the gaps from which our life unfolds.