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 (&ldquo;Brauron&rdquo;, &ldquo;&Beta;&rho;&alpha;&upsilon;&rho;ώ&nu;&alpha;&rdquo;), a sacred place dedicated to Artemis and the &quot;arktoi,&quot; 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 &quot;arktos&quot; 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 &quot;never sets&quot; 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 &ldquo;homeland.&rdquo; 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.

Arktoi

I live in the southern suburbs of Athens. Inhabited continuously since the ancient times, this is a place characterized by material abundance and luxurious lifestyle. At the same time, barbed fences and surveillance cameras turn the houses into border barricades and the streets into an urban &ldquo;no-man&rsquo;s land&rdquo;. This setting poses questions about the role of my own domestic comfort zone and whether protection and restriction are actually the two sides of the same coin. By documenting the paradoxical elements that surround my everyday life, I try to make sense of myself and address my own existential questions. Seen together, these elements form heterotopias that are extracted from their surroundings, offer a new viewpoint and make a novel comment upon the existing references. Having the documentary genre as a starting point, the reality that I present is therefore a distilled one, a visual testimony of my endeavor to re-create the environment and the people that surround me. My heroes, as alternate versions of myself, dwell in affluence, within their dazzling, colorful bubbles. Both watching and being watched, they look like fireflies in a sealed jar filled with sugar water.

Sunville

Etesian is a study on the arid, rocky landscape of the mainland of Naxos island. A landscape carved by the winds and altered by human activity, sometimes subtly and respectfully and others in an absurd and relentless way.

vasileiou.photo

Arktoi_projects

Sunville_projects

Etesian_projects