Ioanna Sakellaraki: Mourning, A Cultural Experience of Loss Today

August 2022

Ioanna Sakellaraki Exhibition: The truth is in the soil
2022.8.20 - 2022.8.28
Reminders Photography Stronghold
2 Chome-38-5 Higashimukojima, Sumida City, Tokyo
Open daily 13:00-19:00 / No admissions

Opening Artist Talk: 23rd of August, 19:00
Talk Event ‘Photographers talk about publishing photobooks’
Guest Speakers: Ioanna Sakellaraki, Yusuke Takagi, Moe Suzuki : 27th of August 19:00

Years ago, Ioanna Sakellaraki returned to her hometown because of the death of her father. The journey sparked her exploration about funerary rites in Greece and the "professional mourners" that have become a cultural experience of loss today. Then she spent five years creating the project The truth is in the soil. Recently, Ioanna Sakellaraki's solo exhibition is about to opening in Tokyo, so we reached out to her to talk about her hometown, mourning tradition, and her creations.

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ABOUT ARTIST

Ioanna Sakellaraki (b.1989) is a Greek visual artist and researcher. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people.

Website：ioannasakellaraki.com
Instagram：ioannasakellaraki_photograhy_

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P: We know that you’ve lived in many different countries. How do you think these life experiences have influenced you?

I learned to make work about home elsewhere. Each time I lose a place, I find it all over again and there is a certain sort of freedom in this way of being.

P: What inspired you to create the project “The truth is in the soil”?

The death of my father sparked a journey back home and the exploration of traditional funerary rites. The series is the result of a 5-year exploration of grief, developed in the intersection of ancestral rituals, private trauma and the passage of time, as an elegy to my late father and the dying tradition of mourning in my homeland Greece. Portraying my mother as a mourning figure within the social and religious context of my country, I began to slowly unravel a personal narrative of loss interweaving fabrications of grief in my family and culture. Endeavouring to further understand my roots, I expanded the scope of my research on the collective mourning and ritual laments of the last communities of professional mourners in the Mani peninsula of Greece.

P: Could you tell us more about the profession “moirologists” (professional mourners) in Greece?

For example, the mourning tradition in Greece, their jobs, what services they provide… Mortuary rituals have been long understood as a way of humans adapting to death in different cultures across the world.

In Greece, the so-called Moirologia (moira translating as ‘fate’ in Greek and logos as ‘speech’), can be traced to the choirs of the 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.

Since antiquity, relatives of the deceased, primarily women, conducted the elaborate burial rituals that were customarily of three parts: the prothesis (laying out of the body), the ekphora (funeral procession), and the interment of the body or cremated remains of the deceased. To sing laments is not something one can learn, ‘’it is in one’s blood’’ which requires certain verbal and musical skill. The laments themselves are usually passed from mother to daughter. They are sung by the women of the house and the closes neighbouring women, often professional lamenters in some cases. They are usually divided in three stages: they are sung in the traditional wake in the house before the burial, during the burial procession, and at the tomb. Afterwards, laments are sung in fixed intervals. The laments constitute a ritual that is considered a social duty in most of those villages.

P: After completing the project, do you feel like you are more able to understand death or personal loss than before?

I believe that photography can help you walk through the dark times. While working on this project, my own photographic practice transformed into a question of becoming through loss and became the passageway for reconnecting with my homeland as a land of curiosity where death is an encounter through family, religion, mythology and the self.

P: Do you choose different cameras to create different works? What does it depend on?

In my work, I see rituals as spaces where bodies and emotions come together to perform death. Through both manual and digital processes, I attempt to establish similarly intricate rituals through my images.

My process of documenting the communities of mourners has been substantial for the initial stages of this body of work. It has been important for me to carry out the work in the field, finding the real women and documenting their reality in the remote villages of the Mani peninsula. However, I felt that making a work about grief required a journey through memory and memory loss. As I continued to work on the project, my images made me question how mourning could become a cultural experience of loss today.

While constructing the final pieces, shot with my Zenza Bronica SQ-A, I gradually experimented by post-editing my film negatives and playing with inverted light and shade, relief and contour, exploring the inherent recognizability of the figure’s outline. Some of my mixed-media images transport the mourners to remote landscapes, showing only the black back sides of their garments as they gaze at mountain ranges and roiling tides. In other cases, their silhouettes appear to have decomposed, as though over time, into the very texture of their surroundings: a chain-link fence, an aging vase, a cave wall etched with chalk drawings.

To me, the dialogue between the documentary and creative process that follows by adding another layer to what has been documented as real, allows the narrative to be rerouted between existing and imaginary spaces, creating a space where death can exist.

P: Most of your creations talks about collective cultural memory, loss and death. Is that the topics you always focus on? And what make you interested in this field?

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. Making a work about grief requires a journey through memory and memory loss. Through my images, I want to talk about what is lost; parts of memory that were reconstructed just like the image of a lost person is in our minds, after they are gone. In the process of documenting photographically the communities of mourners, 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 professional mourning.

P: Do you have any childhood memories of your hometown? Or a most memorable event from your childhood.

I remember my first memory of snow as something rare back home in Greece. I have kept an image of this childhood memory which I occasionally revisit.

P: Can you describe your daily life outside of work?

I usually read literature or philosophy and write. I like taking long walks and enjoy hiking.

P: Can you share with us the thoughts or progress of your new creation?

As part of my current practice- led PhD at RMIT School of Art in Melbourne, I have been exploring the relationship between mourning and the creative process through fragmentary writing, with emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, drawing a parallel conversation across literature and poetry, photographic works and film pieces, in the attempt to trace the faces of memory when it seeks to remember the trauma of death.