The Archive Between Us

A long buried family secret surfaces through my father’s archive, compelling its performance across generations. Through collective witnessing, the women mediating his life transform silence into inquiry, shaping a counterarchive that resists resolution.

The trilogy unfolds as a personal and artistic reckoning with the archive, an inherited legacy that both anchors and destabilises the familial identity. Developed in dialogue with and against my late father’s maritime archive, the work navigates the tension between preservation and disruption of our familial tapestry. Its contents; photographs, fieldnotes, mollusk specimens; are not merely records but provocations, revealing a long-buried family secret that fractures the shared knowledge we once held.

In Part One: The Seven Circuits of a Pearl, the pearl emerges as a symbolic thread. A necklace worn by Anna, my father’s previously unknown to me ex-wife, surfaces in his records and becomes a cipher of desire, longing and moral ambiguity. This intimate object initiates a journey between my homeland Greece and my temporary home in Western Australia’s so-called ‘Pearling Capital of the World’, where the colonial legacy of the pearling industry haunts the narrative. The archive here is not static but porous, seductive and complicit.

Part Two: Nine Years on the Lizard Reef deepens this inquiry through the revelation of my half-brother, Dimitris, born to my father and Anna. His discovery does not resolve the story but rather fractures it further. Inspired by my father’s mollusk collection and my own journeys through the coral islands of the Australian Great Barrier Reef, I reimagine the archive not as a vessel of truth but as a living organism shaped by concealment, pressure and survival. Memory becomes tidal, receding, returning, reshaping, while demanding attentiveness to gaps, distortions and the emotional residue of what was never meant to be found.

In Part Three: Twelve Islands through a Peephole, the archival gaze turns toward female relationships. Returning to Greece, I establish my art studio in the Athenian port of Piraeus, steps away from where Anna and Dimitris live, and invite my mother and sisters to engage with the material. This act of collaborative witnessing transforms the archive into a constellation of intergenerational bonds. Through photographs, recordings and shared memory work, silence is confronted and the creative labour shared between the women mediating my father’s archive becomes a method of inquiry.

As the artist and conduit, I occupy a liminal role mediating between inherited fragments and emergent narratives. The counter-archive I construct resists resolution through the embodied act of co-imagining.