Nostos (The Vessel)

With the financial crisis in the European south and the ensuing movement of populations in search for a better future, there is a new sociocultural order established within Europe, consisting of people that have no longer a defined national background but feel more as citizens of a bigger community on the move, sharing similar hardships, fears and hopes for the future. Having lived half of my life within this community wandering around Europe as an economic emigrant, I started exploring my cultural, political, sexual and social identity in relation to my roots and my new surroundings. Are roots and memory the predominant tools that shape this new order? How do current narratives and now lived experiences contribute to a constant migrant identity?

Nostos is an autobiographical project where I explore my identity by rendering the body as a vessel of imprinted and acquired experiences. Family relationships, friendships, erotic desires and acts of self contemplation come at play in random order as memories arise from the subconscious.

It was triggered by moments of introspection during the pandemic lockdowns and slowly transcended into an ongoing combination of speaking images and visual words that, when intertwined, form a new language of self definition. The sense of returning and belonging is the gravitational centre around which the images revolve; a circular Odyssey between the past and the present.