οἶκος kai Mnemosyne/ Re-Membering HoMe

Irini Athanassakis
40 pencil drawings on paper (24x24cm each) Work in Progress, initiated in 2005

Being a migrant and born from parents of different nationalities and social and cultural backgrounds is certainly a gift. But many persons, places and things go missing with each move. And the idea of home and "the house", symbol of the human existence itself eversince the sedentarisation of men, are not bound to one single place but tend to blur various buildings, landscapes, languages, scents, sounds, faces and smiles. The ongoing discovery of possible new homes painfully reminds the absence of the one and only οἶκος, considered as the foundation of the self and of society. Despite the exaltation of the new, the missing home becomes an imaginary place and the source of imagination itself.

40 years of moving on and forth are the mater-ial of this series of 40 drawings of transitory homes. Memories of spaces and persons, exceptional or daily expériences, ambiguous feelings and dreams are an attempt to remember, to imagine and to forget. With Mnemosyne’s support reality and imagination, space and time, lines and words get tangled to a knitwork of a migrants images of oikos. A disegno of portable spaces to look at in order imagine the next move...