Λαλά
/ra'ra/
This installation explores memory, belonging, and intergenerational ties.
The hand, a grandmother’s hand, replaces words: it holds tenderness, care, practice, and craft, strong intentions carried across time.
Wearing the same wedding ring, it is surrounded by her husband’s words, tied like an invisible embrace, a quiet protection, symbol of loyalty and belonging.
Fishing nets hang in the space, stitched with photographs of her life. Nets made of knots: experiences, encounters, family ties. We become polygons of these knots, sides of memory and identity. The thread, lace, and semedakia that bind the images are hers - her craft holds the archive together.
Beneath, her bedside table and tin box, once filled with koulourakia, now with sewing tools, root the work in domestic rituals of love and care.
The title Λαλά /ra'ra/ comes from the dialect of Apeiranthos, Naxos, where Λαλά means grandmother, and the rolled Λ becomes Ρ — echoing language as memory, carried deep like roots.
Her hand.
It rests
gently, deliberately,
like it has carried a thousand quiet acts of love
and still holds more.
This hand has sewn hems in silence,
blessed meals with a cross,
smoothed sheets, braided hair,
offered fruit,
tucked in children.
Worn the same ring
through grief, through births, through hugs,
and through years stitched into tablecloths.
Now it wears time
as softly as it once wore lace.
The ring remains -
not just metal,
but memory.
A circle of care passed down,
silent love wrapped around skin.
I left home,
but I carry her hand.
In the knots of a net,
in thread,
in the small rituals of making.
I cross the sea, stay connected.
This is how I belong:
through gesture,
through tenderness,
through the thread and needle she touched,
and passed on.
A face, then another.
Now a grandmother, once a bride offered a ring, a sister, a daughter.
Their lives held in photobooth strips and ID portraits, paper-sized testaments of existence. Her mother, her father, her siblings. A brother holding a son.
A house rising from soil - not the island’s but Athens’. One home traded for another, never fully letting go of either.
Some of these people I never met. Others I recognise - in gestures, recipes, rituals, ways of moving through and across the world. And maybe that’s what it means to be a bridge: between generations, between cities, between lives.
These are the fragments of home.
The ones we carry: in faces, in thread, in the way we remember.
A family album not bound but hung in threads, printed on fabric.
Evidence.
Of care.
Of grief.
Of memory, love, and the long work of belonging.
From the show
