Arktoi

This photographic project was born as an excavation of memory and constitutes a wandering through the inner landscape, where childhood experiences continue to operate subliminally, shaping identities, reappearing in losses, transitions, ruptures, and returns.

Vravrona (“Brauron”, “Βραυρώνα”), a sacred place dedicated to Artemis and the "arktoi," the girls who participated in rites of passage from childhood to adulthood, serves as an archetypal setting. A landscape of memory before language and speech, where nature and body converse with a primal voice. The "arktos" here is not just the mythical girl or the wild animal. It is a multi-layered symbol: nurturer, protector, bearer of cosmic energy, crossing the Sky, the Earth, and the Underworld. Like the constellation of the Great Bear, it "never sets" and thus becomes a reference point for an eternal memory that transcends time.

Portraits of young women are juxtaposed with personal photographs dominated by the sea, another element of transition and symbolic womb. The sea is never neutral: it carries within it fear and desire, purity and trauma. Water as a primary element reflects the fluidity of the self, while its salt becomes a trace of both pain and healing.

The work is permeated by experiences of internal transition: loss as reconstruction, coming of age as a break from the original bond, exile of the self, a rift in identity, the search for an existential “homeland.” The sea functions here as a transitional field, an intermediate space where trauma coexists with the possibility of transformation.

Myth and nature converge in a cosmology of experience, where everything, heavenly, earthly, and subterranean, is connected. The bear carries the knowledge of the cycle: of hibernation, of the cave as a womb, of death leading to new life. This photographic work, without being a ritualistic representation, stands as a narrative on mourning, desire, transition, and the memory of the body. It is an elegiac pilgrimage to the point where the ancient and the personal meet with the memory of sea water.