Documenting Britain
I will examine where the history and institutional definition of ownership, geographies and belonging of these islands cross with a generous interpretation of my own lineage. It will meander from the perception of Viking pillaging, to the definition of Scottish/Nordic words like huss and heim as low class slang to the business of making borders in lands where there were none, stories of colonizations and protectorates, ancient treasures and individual human destinies. The work consist of text and images and will be process oriented, fragmented and experimental.
January
A while after the family photo was taken in Adrianouple 1895 my great grandmother Eleni by who I take my middle name died from trying to to induce an abortion eating Ergot (a poison derived from a fungus that grows on rye). My grandfather the child sitting sitting down infront of the others. When he was mid-teens he started walking west as so many others have done before and after him. He walked and walked and worked and worked. From Adrianouple, to Kavala, to Drama to, Thesaloniki, to New York. He considered himself Greek but never set fot in Greece until the late 50s when my Father and Mother took him “back” and the volatil borders that once had made the places where he walked part of the country he was born in, had been redrawn so they now belonged to this other place which had never really existed but yet claimed him and somehow maybe even me.