Transforming Sadness into Art: The Story of Ioanna Sakellaraki
Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'The Truth is in the Soil,' by Ioanna Sakellaraki (published by GOST Books). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.
We human beings have our own ways to deal with sadness. Some cry, some withdraw into themselves, and some pick up a camera and start taking pictures. Imagine going on a journey where you turn your sadness into something beautiful and meaningful. That’s exactly what Ioanna Sakellaraki did in her five-year project, “The Truth is in the Soil.” After the loss of her father, Ioanna returned to her home in Greece and started using photography to understand and express her grief. She didn’t just want to capture her feelings; she also wanted to explore the old traditions of mourning in Greece that were slowly disappearing. Her work combines real and imagined scenes, creating powerful images that show how people deal with loss in different ways.
In this interview, you’ll see how Ioanna’s photos go beyond just capturing moments. She uses both traditional and digital techniques to add layers and effects to her pictures, making them look like they’re from a dream. Her photos feature landscapes and portraits, some in black and white and others in color, which together tell a complex story of grief, memory, and cultural rituals. It’s a mix of personal feelings and cultural traditions, all shown through her unique artistic style. See how she turned her own experience into a project that speaks to everyone, blending personal loss with the collective experience of mourning in Greek society.
Exploration of Grief: “The Truth is in the Soil” is described as a 5-year exploration of grief as an elegy to your late father and the dying tradition of mourning in Greece. Can you elaborate on how your personal experience of loss shaped the direction and focus of this project?
It is great speaking to you about The Truth is in the Soil at this stage of my creative practice, seven years after the project first began, as I now come to see how this body of work allowed for both a deep personal expression and creative experimentation that eventually changed my practice forever.
After the death of my father, I returned to my homeland Greece, following a decade of having lived abroad, and re-connected with my family and culture in ways that I had not experienced before. My mother had turned religious which brought me in direct contact with her daily rituals which slowly shaped my creative concerns around grief by allowing me to re-read my own self through my culture.
I was a Greek woman who had left home for a while and had now returned, in my late twenties, having to deal with a loss I had never experienced. How was I going to do that? Photography was the answer, and it still is. Back then I had not yet formed what I now come to call ‘my creative practice’ and by lacking any definition for it is exactly how this work allowed for the courage and patience for gradually building it. I had lost something significant, and this is how I began making ‘my photography’ happen for me through the subject of death.
I quit my day job and started making and making and making, until what was originally framed as a documentary project started taking me elsewhere; that other place I had been always looking for inside myself and eventually through my work. I would say that this is exactly how my personal experience of loss shaped not only the direction of this project but that of my practice overall.
Collective Mourning: Your project investigates collective mourning in Greek society and the intersection of ancestral rituals, private trauma, and the passage of time. How did you navigate the balance between personal grief and the broader cultural context of mourning traditions in Greece?
Back then, I never asked myself if what I was doing was personal. I just really needed to make it. I now, in retrospective, realize that my work is always personal to a certain degree. I am never included in my artworks but there is a deeply personal concern that motivates my being through my making. I make to understand why I make through myself who is not an explicit part of the work, but rather anchors itself through the conceptual and material forms I engage with in my practice.
The Truth is in the Soil is an example of that. I did not start moving away from the personal loss, but I rather began including the world in it. I believe that I wanted to speak about these things even before I left home, before I ‘became’ a photographer. And that was the time when it all came together: religion, family, identity, the self, collective culture and death. I did not know how to mourn like my mother or sisters. But I had to go through it.
My father’s orthodox Christian funeral was a pivotal moment for this. In my book I begin by writing about the mourning ritual which begins in our living room where I arrive from the airport to find my father laying dressed in his coffin and I realize that I so strongly need to make a memory of this by photographing him. Right in that moment I know that my pain and photography are not just linked but are inseparable. So, at my father’s funeral I observe all the processes of how the body is handled, how the open coffin ceremony takes place, how people are so expressive about their grief shouting out loud and crying really intensely. But I cannot cry on that day, I just observe like a spectator. They share but I do not, yet.
During that moment I also understand my ‘quality’ of being able to do that, able to separate myself from a personal narrative and reach that other space which I try to construct through my work. During the funeral, something significant happens which I had very much feared it would; an utter exposure of grief. My aunt Katina somewhere in the background of everything starts howling and tells us about how she would like to perform the traditional Moirologia. I remember that I felt so intense at that moment and expressed to my family that I would prefer that she did not. When the funeral ends, I do not regret this decision, but I am triggered by it. Why had this intensely public encounter with grief in my homeland’s cultural vocabulary confused me this way?
So, when I get back home, I start reading and listening to Moirologia and before I ‘get’ what the feeling evoked by them is I cry, or should I say I lament*? At the next stage, I decide to research this, see who grieves in such a way still. This brings me to my first visit to the Mani peninsula of Greece, where the last traditional mourners reside. At first it is very hard to connect with them as I do not even know my actual intention myself. I tell them I have lost my father and I want to spend time with them. I do not photograph them for a while until I do. When their backs are turned towards the landscapes, I strongly connect with them because I do not see them as ‘turning away’ but as ‘turning towards’ that other world; the one I want to make part of my grief. So, this edit of images, instead of the frontal portraits of them which had preceded it, becomes my voice in this.
*A bit of background on this that you might find necessary:
In Greece, the so-called Moirologia (moira translating as ‘fate’ in Greek and logos as ‘speech’), can be traced to the choirs of the Greek tragedies, in which the principal singer would begin the mourning and the chorus would follow. Archeological evidence, present clearly that the tradition goes back to the early Protogeometric period (11th BCE) of the Iron Age and possibly beyond.
Since antiquity, relatives of the deceased, primarily women, conducted the elaborate burial rituals that were customarily of three parts: the prothesis (laying out of the body, the ekphora (funeral procession), and the interment of the body or cremated remains of the deceased. To sing laments is not something one can learn, ‘’it is in one’s blood’’ which requires certain verbal and musical skill. The laments themselves are usually passed from mother to daughter. They are sung by the women of the house and the closes neighbouring women, often professional lamenters in some cases. They are usually divided in three stages: they are sung in the traditional wake in the house before the burial, during the burial procession, and at the tomb. Afterwards, laments are sung in fixed intervals. The laments constitute a ritual that is considered a social duty in most of those villages.
Photographic Process: The images in your project range from landscapes to portraits and are captured using medium format photography. Could you discuss your approach to adding layers to your photographs through manual and digital processes, and how this contributes to the thematic exploration of loss and memory?
As mentioned, the documentary aspect has always been there. I photographed my mother on the hillside of the cemetery where my father is buried, his marble grave, the cypresses surrounding it, the church ceremony, the small altar my mother built in our garden under the orange tree my father passed and many other things. But that was not the project, that was the concern behind it. These images though were as substantial as the outcome of them which as you point out was different. A big part of my work, now too, is based on constructing those images between what I saw as real and how I re-interpret this. I guess the actual versatility of memory lays in this. Those processes are my way of really understanding the work by memorizing it myself as a pattern. The landscapes are still there but are not the same. They only recall one another through their repetition. And the mourners are still there but transformed into unrecognizable figures or even the landscapes themselves. My own art is about capturing this transformation which is both organic and imposed. Memories change you forever, especially the ones of death. Photography makes sure this will happen to you. And I embrace it.
Versatility in Imagery: Your imagery shifts from black and white to color and from the abstract to the figurative. What informs these stylistic choices, and how do they contribute to the narrative and emotional resonance of your work?
In plain language, the black and white imagery is the originally shot documentary work and the mixed media artworks which include colour and texture derive from those initial images. When I begin working on an image, I rarely use an empty canvas, but I begin with a texture which for me resembles the emotion evoked by the portrait I engage with. Then this portrait starts imitating that texture, adding to it, becoming one with it, until both the portrait and the initial texture make for a new surface. It is a type of camouflage but contrary to the instantaneous nature of it, my layering can take days or weeks. Sometimes I want to touch the ‘skin’ of those images, so I print them out, re-work them, re-photograph them, scan them and re-edit them as suitable. The final works can look entirely different than the ones integrated in the piece at the very start, but I can say that I know that the work is ready when I ask myself if the feeling that I have looking at it is as strong. And to me, many times is even stronger than that first documentary image that navigated me here. It is a conduit of thought that helped me make something out of it, sometimes this is art and others, like at this stage of my practice, is also the writing which could add to the versatility of this imagery as we can see through my fictocritical writings in the monograph The Truth is in the Soil too.
For a while now, and since my MA Photography at The Royal College of Art, I have been interested in inter- disciplinary critical theory in relation to visual art. I am currently finalizing my PhD which is practice- led with art and creative writing as its main components. Writing adds to my making and the other way around. This process began by bringing my writings informed by European continental philosophy and literary theory with a focus on French literary thinker Maurice Blanchot’s work, in conversation with my making in my first monograph.
There is a helplessness that defines the limits of language and thought when encountering the unknown in death and the practice and both writing and making have allowed for building a resistance to this helplessness especially in my newer works which I speak about further on.
Impact of Global Loss: In your statement, you mention the global context of loss within cultures and civilizations. How do you see “The Truth is in the Soil” contributing to the broader conversation about mortality and collective mourning in a global context?
Death is an open, infinite space which is impossible to articulate. The ineffable in it is its very own expression. Mourning, in turn, begins by observing a system of cultural beliefs and traditions, in this work, to lead towards what cannot be explained about all this; the unknown, the unknowable, the uncertain and unthematizable in image and thought.
I similarly allow for the language in The Truth is in the Soil to remain open and ungrounded but still inspired and heavily informed by the reality of all this which brings us back the nature of language and its inherent limitations in capturing its full essence. In that way the people who engage with these works will do so fragmentarily working through those omissions; they can be taken back to their own homelands on the other side of the world, where the lands are sunless and colder than the Mediterranean, or where the vegetation at their gardens at nights has the same colour of my canvases and in whose memories maybe the fold of ‘my’ mourners’ textiles or the pomegranate seeds on my mother’s tablecloth becomes something entirely different. But the most important thing is that the images will still take them there and allow them to connect in their own capacity.
Future Projects: Given the deeply personal and emotionally resonant nature of this project, do you see yourself continuing to explore themes of grief and mourning in future photographic projects, or do you anticipate moving in a different direction artistically?
Yes. Since when The Truth is in the Soil ended, I have working on a new project entitled The Seven Circuits of a Pearl which is part of a trilogy called Tales of Sea, Lust and Death. The series engages with my father’s maritime archive found after his death and his other family I did not know about but got to discover in his records from his time as a sailor. The series progresses through my intimate journey between my homeland Greece and my current place of residence Australia. It allows for a reciprocal exchange and anamorphosis of personal and collective histories as unstable grounds being open to interpretive invention.
Part One, ‘The Seven Circuits of a Pearl’, begins with my uneasy process to narrate these secret findings through the historic and symbolic interpretations of the pearl. First encountered in the form of a pearl necklace my father’s, unknown to me, ex- wife appears to wear in his records, it emerges as the symbol of desire, longing and moral ambiguity of an evolving narrative between Greece and Western Australia, ‘The Pearling Capital of the World’ from over a century ago.
In Part Two, ‘Nine Days on the Lizard Reef’, I dismantle a family lie which leads me to the discovery of my half- brother, by my father and his ex-wife, whom I have never met. Diving deep inside the oceans of the forever unknown and continuously reformed in my family history and creative practice, I find myself on the faraway Lizard Island of the Great Barrier Reef, where I work on site with my father’s reptile skin collection and stories of deception and camouflage of desert lizards and marine iguanas in this other part of the world.
In Part Three, ‘Twelve Islands through a Peephole’, I return to my homeland Greece and carry out repetitive visits to my unknown family’s residency at the Athenian port of Piraeus and the abandoned holiday house they once had on Patmos, the so- called Island of the Apocalypse in the Dodecanese Archipelago. Building up my own ‘voyeuristic’ archive of photographs, recordings and fieldnotes, I collect what may eventually lead to the anticipated reveal of a complex truth as the epilogue of my creative inquiry and self-quest.
I am still working my way through it. It is one of the most challenging works I have made for me. Memories here have not been lived by me, but they are only imagined. I work with somebody else’s (my dead father’s) memories and I re-build them by re- visiting them in real life which has become an almost performative part of my practice.
At the moment, I have finalized part One which is exhibited at Bangkok Art and Culture Center until 8 September and at Athens Photo Festival at the Benaki Museum until 28 July.
Audience Engagement: What do you hope viewers take away from experiencing “The Truth is in the Soil”? How do you envision your work sparking conversations or reflections on mortality, loss, and the human struggle for meaning?
To answer this question, I will speak about my family. My mother and sisters have no interest in art overall. The way I communicated my grief through this project was maybe strange for them at first, but they found a way to connect to it that was outside our own loss as a family. I hope the same for anyone who goes through a loss. Loss is always personal and taking it out to the open world hurts. I hope these images soothe some hurtful memories and any audience finds comfort like I did by making this work. The greatest thing is that the works gives back by providing that feeling to others. Maybe that is some type of resolution? At least for the time being.
The image is always a fugitive encounter afterall.
To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (Amazon, GOST Books)
Key Takeaways for Photographers
Harness Personal Experiences: Use personal experiences, like Sakellaraki’s grief, as powerful inspiration for your projects.
Cultural Exploration: Integrate cultural heritage and traditional rituals into your work to add depth and authenticity.
Innovative Techniques: Experiment with both manual and digital processes to create unique, layered imagery that blends reality and imagination.
Emotional Resonance: Aim for your work to evoke strong emotional responses by varying styles, such as shifting from black and white to color.
Broader Conversations: Use your art to contribute to larger conversations about universal themes like mortality and collective memory, making your work relatable to a wider audience.
Ioanna Sakellaraki
Ioanna Sakellaraki was born in 1989 in Greece. She is a visual artist and researcher who works in both Australia and Europe. Her art focuses on how memories and stories blend together, using photography to explore these themes deeply. Ioanna holds a PhD in Art, which she pursued thanks to a Doctoral Scholarship, and an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art. Over the years, she has received many awards, including the Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award in 2018 and a Sony World Photography Award in 2020. Her projects have been exhibited in galleries and art festivals around the world, with solo shows in cities like Tokyo, Melbourne, and Berlin. Her work has been featured in well-known magazines such as The New Yorker, TIME, and The Guardian. Her book, “The Truth is in the Soil,” published by GOST Books, shares her journey of turning personal grief into a visual story that resonates with many. (Website, Instagram)
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