Color photographs, Archival inject print,
20X30 cm. Edition of 7.
« Locus Animae » means «Place of soul» in latin.
These are photographs created in a trip to Greece during the years in which I lived in Paris. A spontaneous summer expression and recording of images, rushing by a nostalgia, as I had just returned from the foreign lands. The title is inspired by a practical remedy that was once applied in area of Olympus. When one felt that she/he had lost her/his balance from some intense stress, and her/his body reacted with anorexia and vertigo, then the woman therapist (an old woman) laid the patient in a bed and made with her hands circular movements around the navel, a type of massage. At the same time he uttered some words, which were funny, but it sounded like a little spell. They ended with an important invocation to the soul: "Come soul to your place."(Εla psychi ston topo sou. Έλα ψυχή στον τόπο σου).
The navel is the central point of the body. The umbilical cord also binds the fetus to the mother. The loss of balance therefore seems to be related to the removal from our center, and from what feeds us and gives us life. As if the soul has left her place.
These photographs express the soul's metaphorical places, which can be a memory, a picture, a melody, and anything valuable one can keep in her/his heart and mind.
Greece, 2009
