Grief touches every human life, yet each experience is as singular as a fingerprint. For Greek artist Ioanna Sakellaraki, the profound sorrow of losing her father catalyzed an extraordinary creative evolution. Rather than turning inward or seeking escape, she chose to explore her pain through a visionary five-year artistic endeavor titled The Truth is in the Soil. What began as a deeply personal tribute grew into a rich exploration of ancestral mourning practices in Greece, confronting both personal and collective rituals surrounding loss.
Returning to her homeland after years abroad, Ioanna encountered the intersection of private trauma and the cultural rituals she had once left behind. The outcome is a body of work that traverses the terrain of memory, emotion, and time, where images are not only visual records but metaphysical spaces that embody mourning and transformation. Through an interplay of documentary sensibility and imaginative reconstruction, she created work that transcends time and place, engaging with universal questions about death, legacy, and the fragility of human memory.
Personal Grief as a Creative Catalyst
The origins of The Truth is in the Soil lie in the seismic loss of Ioanna Sakellaraki’s father—a rupture so profound that it not only shifted her personal world but also redirected the entire trajectory of her artistic life. After more than a decade away from Greece, the death drew her back home, not merely in a geographical sense but into the spiritual and emotional lineage of her ancestry. What she encountered was not only a personal tragedy but a cultural mirror, reflecting back the rituals, beliefs, and elegiac practices deeply rooted in the Greek psyche.
This return marked more than a reentry into familiar surroundings. It represented a reawakening to unspoken traditions, familial patterns, and ancient rites of passage—an immersion into a culture where grief is communal, ceremonial, and theatrically expressive. In this charged environment, she found herself disoriented, unable to process her grief in ways that were expected or prescribed. Unlike her immediate family, who wept and embraced the visceral expressions of sorrow, she remained on the periphery—watching, absorbing, quietly unraveling.
There was no predetermined framework to guide her. Her creative expression at the time was embryonic, undefined. What she had was a visceral need, a subterranean pull toward creation as a form of survival. Out of this undefined place, The Truth is in the Soil began—not as a planned artistic endeavor, but as a soul-level impulse to find shape in the formless. Her work slowly evolved into an intimate ritual of its own—an exploration of mourning that would eventually expand far beyond her personal grief, reaching into a broader, almost mythic dimension of human loss and memory.
Intertwining Private Loss with Communal Traditions
Returning to Greece meant more than navigating sorrow—it meant confronting the culturally ingrained ways grief is structured and performed. The mourning traditions of Orthodox Christianity are elaborate, deeply encoded within the national consciousness. For Sakellaraki, these communal scripts of lament felt alien, even though they were part of her heritage. Her mother had become deeply religious in her absence, and her sisters leaned into the inherited customs. But Ioanna found herself emotionally muted, unable to cry, unable to fully participate.
Instead, her mourning manifested through an act of profound observation. She began to witness everything—the rituals, the silence, the expressions of others—as though she were both participant and outsider. Her experience crystallized during her father’s funeral vigil, held in their family home. As she stood before his open casket, she instinctively raised her camera. In that quiet yet seismic moment, she understood that documenting this passage was not voyeuristic—it was essential. Image-making was not an attempt to escape grief, but to integrate it, to honor it, and ultimately, to transmute it.
Another moment pierced her consciousness with equal force. Her aunt, stirred by centuries of oral tradition, offered to perform the Moirologia—a haunting lament for the dead passed down through generations. Overwhelmed, Ioanna declined. The ritual felt too raw, too exposing. But this rejection seeded a question in her soul, one that would not leave her: What was it about this ancient song that unsettled her so deeply? This inquiry became the catalyst for her immersive journey into Greece’s vanishing funerary customs, and ultimately, a central thread in her work.
Echoes of Ritual in a Dying Tradition
Her search for understanding led her to the Mani peninsula, a region often referred to as the last bastion of ancestral mourning practices in Greece. It is here that fragments of an age-old oral culture still persist, whispered and wailed by elder women—keepers of memory and mediators between the living and the dead. These women are not performers in the modern sense. Their chants, or Moirologia, are improvisational laments that arise from a place far deeper than learned skill. They are inherited, encoded in blood, passed down like heirlooms from mother to daughter.
The songs themselves, layered with metaphor and sorrow, serve as a living archive of human emotion. They do not follow scripts but are summoned spontaneously, tailored to the deceased and the memories they leave behind. The lament is a eulogy and a release, a public expression of personal devastation that becomes sacred in its rawness. Their cadence evokes the ancient Greek chorus—simultaneously personal and archetypal.
When Sakellaraki first encountered the mourners, she did not immediately photograph them. She spent time with them, learning their rhythms, understanding their silences. Eventually, she began to create portraits—but not in the conventional sense. Many of the women are shown turned away, facing windswept hills or open skies. These are not images of individuals but embodiments of longing. Their backs, their posture, their stillness—all suggest a turning not away from life, but toward an invisible realm just beyond reach.
In this visual decision, Sakellaraki found her symbolic lexicon: mourning as orientation toward the unknown. Each frame becomes a conduit—a silent threshold—between this world and what lies beyond.
The Terrain of Memory and Imagination
At the core of The Truth is in the Soil lies a distinctive process that blurs the distinctions between reality and illusion, documentation and interpretation. The earliest images in the series—captured amidst the raw aftermath of her father’s passing—serve as touchstones, but not final destinations. Rather than present these moments as fixed, she subjects them to transformation, embedding them in layers of texture, time, and digital manipulation.
This method mirrors the way memory itself behaves—elusive, shifting, subjective. Memory does not preserve the past intact; it edits, forgets, embellishes. Sakellaraki honors this inherent instability by allowing her images to evolve. A portrait might begin in stark monochrome and slowly absorb color, grain, light distortions, even physical intervention—scratching, tearing, rephotographing, scanning. These manipulations are not distortions of truth but deeper revelations of it.
Over time, even the landscapes begin to take on human qualities. Trees mourn. Stone walls seem to exhale. Time folds in on itself. In this visual language, the grieving body merges with the grieving environment, dissolving the boundary between personal sorrow and ecological memory. It’s a haunting metamorphosis—grief as atmosphere, as landscape, as a shifting threshold between form and formlessness.
Chromatic Emotion and Symbolic Layers
The emotional spectrum of Sakellaraki’s work is most viscerally felt through her manipulation of tone and texture. Her early black-and-white compositions act as elegiac anchors—evoking the solemnity of ancient rituals and the harsh clarity of freshly felt loss. These images are stark, sparse, almost funerary in their stillness.
But as the project develops, color seeps in—not brightly, but subtly, like bruises blooming under the skin. These chromatic decisions are deeply intentional, guided not by aesthetic preference but emotional resonance. She does not begin with a blank canvas. Rather, she starts with a tactile foundation—an image or a surface that holds emotional memory—and builds upon it with painstaking care. Portraits melt into textures. Skies dissolve into mourning veils. The work becomes less about representation and more about invocation.
This complex layering often takes weeks to complete. Images are printed, scratched, touched, scanned, and re-formed. The original may become unrecognizable, but the emotional essence intensifies. It’s a ritual of transformation, echoing the way loss reshapes the soul. The process is intuitive yet rigorous, and the result is art that feels not only seen but felt—viscerally, somatically, timelessly.
Writing as Ritual, Language as Vessel
Parallel to her visual endeavors, Sakellaraki engages deeply with literary and philosophical inquiry. Her writings, especially those inspired by thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, explore the limits of language when confronting the unknowable—death, silence, the void. This intellectual engagement is not separate from her creative work but inextricably linked. Writing becomes another vessel for mourning, another terrain in which the unspeakable might be approached, if never fully expressed.
Through her research and writing, she navigates complex themes such as absence, presence, ancestral inheritance, and cultural memory. The interplay between text and image in her monograph extends the viewer’s experience, allowing them to inhabit the work not just visually but mentally and emotionally. It forms a multidimensional mourning space—one that welcomes reflection, discomfort, and eventual transcendence.
Mourning Without Borders: Universal Echoes of Loss
Though deeply rooted in the specifics of Greek culture, The Truth is in the Soil speaks to a broader human truth. The rituals may be Hellenic, the landscapes Mediterranean, but the emotions are borderless. Sorrow, remembrance, longing—these are not owned by any one place or people. Sakellaraki’s images resonate across cultures because they are not about death alone, but about the ways in which we, as humans, attempt to make meaning in the face of it.
Viewers from vastly different geographies find in her work echoes of their own rites, their own silences. A bent back. A flickering candle. A whispered prayer. These visual symbols transcend language and religion, tapping into the shared psychic architecture of mourning. Her work creates a quiet, contemplative space where audiences can project their own stories, their own farewells.
In this way, Sakellaraki becomes not just an artist of grief, but a cartographer of remembrance—mapping out a terrain where personal memory and collective ritual intersect, diverge, and converge once more.
Mourning as Inherited Performance
In Ioanna Sakellaraki’s deeply immersive work The Truth is in the Soil, mourning is not only an emotional response—it is a cultural inheritance. At its core lies the Moirologia, a vanishing ritual of sung laments that have been passed orally from generation to generation in Greece for millennia. The term stems from the Greek moira (fate) and logos (word), and within these etymologies lies the profound human attempt to articulate the ineffable.
The Moirologia chants trace their roots back to the early Iron Age, surviving through ancient tragedy, medieval ritual, and modern transition. They have been preserved primarily by women, who have long held custodianship over the passage between life and death in Greek tradition. These lamenters are not entertainers, but guardians of collective memory. Their role spans from the preparation of the body to the singing of improvised, deeply symbolic dirges at wakes, funerals, and commemorative rites. The chants are not scripted but arise spontaneously, shaped by lived grief and cultural intuition.
Each woman who performs these rituals is both mourner and orator, voicing not only her own sorrow but the sorrow of the community, of ancestors, of time itself. The laments are often delivered in three ceremonial phases: first at the home where the body is laid out; then during the solemn funeral procession; and finally at the burial site, where the cycle of mourning continues in designated intervals over the coming months and years. These are not simply songs but sacred utterances, marked by the cadence of grief and echoing with spiritual significance.
Sakellaraki’s work stands at the crossroads of this disappearing tradition. Rather than attempting to document it in literal form, she reimagines it visually. The result is not a direct representation, but a reverent invocation—a conceptual elegy for rituals fading from public consciousness. Her work acts as a visual requiem, drawing attention to the cultural erosion of mourning practices in contemporary society. Through her lens, she gives voice to what is being lost: the sacred performativity of ancestral grief, the communal textures of sorrow, the rituals that tether us to those who came before.
Memory as Mutable Terrain
In The Truth is in the Soil, memory emerges not as a fixed point, but as a shifting landscape—elastic, elusive, and deeply sensory. The project began with images taken in real-time moments of bereavement: her father’s funeral, her mother’s solitude, the physical sites of farewell. But Sakellaraki’s intent was never to freeze time. Instead, she engages in a continuous metamorphosis of these raw materials, allowing them to evolve through layered reinterpretation.
Her creative method is one of transformation. The original images serve as emotional scaffolding, but they are soon buried under strata of memory, intuition, and temporal distortion. Her works often undergo repeated processes: digital manipulation, textural overlays, analog printing, physical reworking, and re-scanning. This labor-intensive cycle mirrors the recursive nature of grief itself—how memories resurface, shift, and reshape themselves over time.
This mutable process blurs the boundaries between remembrance and re-imagination. Figures become ghostlike, often depicted in silhouette or faded form. Landscapes melt into abstract palettes that recall dreamscapes or spiritual planes. The distinction between human presence and environmental form is intentionally dissolved. In some compositions, it is unclear whether one is looking at a figure or a formation—such is the seamless fusion of body and terrain.
Sakellaraki’s vision implies that the earth itself absorbs and mirrors grief. The topography mourns alongside the mourner. Stones seem to hold memory. Trees become sentinels of sorrow. This metaphorical entanglement between memory and matter reflects a worldview where emotional states are not solely internal but are etched into the physical world. The soil, the light, the texture of the air—all become mnemonic devices in this sacred geography of mourning.
Through this conceptual terrain, Sakellaraki suggests that memory is not a static archive but a living organism—ever changing, sometimes unreliable, but always laden with emotive resonance. This mutable terrain becomes the ground upon which loss is revisited, reinterpreted, and ultimately re-integrated into one’s evolving sense of self.
Emotional Topography and Material Metamorphosis
The physical appearance of The Truth is in the Soil is inextricably linked to its emotional undercurrents. The project weaves visual elements that span from stark monochrome to layered chromatic compositions. These transitions are not simply stylistic—they are deeply psychological. Early images, rendered in black and white, suggest the harsh clarity of fresh grief, the stark contrast between presence and absence. These are the visual echoes of initial mourning, bare and unflinching.
But as the work progresses, it breathes color—muted ochres, bruised blues, and layered grays that speak of emotion as sediment. Sakellaraki does not impose color randomly. Each tone carries the weight of a mood, a moment, or a memory. Often, her images begin with a textured base that resembles aged skin, cracked marble, or weathered cloth. Into this tactile plane, she integrates portraiture and landscape, creating hybrid images that defy categorization.
This technique turns each piece into a palimpsest—an image written over yet never fully erased. The viewer is invited to look deeply, to sense the presence of earlier iterations beneath the surface. This depth mimics the inner work of mourning, where initial pain is never entirely gone, only buried under layers of healing, understanding, and time.
The physical manipulation of her images further intensifies their emotive power. Sakellaraki frequently scratches, folds, and rephotographs her prints, embracing imperfection as part of the process. In doing so, she allows each work to age, to scar, to become a visual analogue for the grief it expresses. This is not art that seeks resolution but instead honors the unfinished nature of mourning.
Cultural Mourning in a Disenchanted Age
In an increasingly digital and disembodied world, the rich, corporeal traditions of mourning are often displaced by sanitized and commercialized rituals. Sakellaraki’s project reclaims the intimate, ancestral quality of grief by rooting it in physical spaces and oral legacies. Her work critiques modern detachment while offering a return to rituals of embodiment.
What makes her intervention so resonant is her refusal to present mourning as spectacle. There is no voyeurism here, no voyeuristic probing of the bereaved. Instead, she constructs an environment where sorrow can be held and witnessed without intrusion. Her images do not command attention—they invite quiet reflection. They are acts of reverence, not revelation.
In this way, Sakellaraki offers a counternarrative to a world increasingly allergic to sorrow. Her visual language speaks to a disenchantment that has swept across many modern societies, eroding the place of death in public consciousness. In reviving forgotten practices and invoking visual forms that echo myth, ritual, and oral storytelling, she re-enchants grief. Her work becomes a contemporary votive, a symbolic altar to memory, to lineage, to the sacredness of goodbye.
Universal Lamentation Through Intimate Language
While The Truth is in the Soil is distinctly shaped by the traditions of Greek mourning, its emotional language transcends borders. Loss is a universal constant. The gestures, symbols, and textures Sakellaraki invokes—folded garments, dimly lit thresholds, silent postures—resonate across cultures and histories. These are archetypal forms, embedded in the collective unconscious.
By emphasizing the visual power of mourning rituals, she creates a vocabulary that is accessible to all, regardless of cultural origin. Her work allows individuals to connect with their own unspoken griefs, to find within her images fragments of their own ancestral practices or personal farewells. The silence in her art is fertile—making space for others to project their memories, their rituals, their unnamed longings.
The tactile quality of her compositions also plays a vital role in their universality. Textures that mimic skin, soil, stone, or fabric evoke sensory associations that go beyond the visual. Viewers don’t just see her work—they feel it. The familiarity of these materials bridges the emotional gap between artist and audience, making grief a shared space rather than a private abyss.
Evolution of a Practice: Mourning Beyond the Personal
While The Truth is in the Soil began as a response to the death of Sakellaraki’s father, it has since evolved into a wider examination of grief’s place in human experience. Her creative trajectory has expanded to include not only visual works but also critical theory and poetic writing. This fusion of forms allows her to access grief from multiple dimensions—visual, intellectual, spiritual.
In her subsequent projects, she has continued to explore familial secrets, buried narratives, and intergenerational memory. Her work interrogates the borders between the imagined and the inherited, the symbolic and the real. Through these inquiries, she suggests that mourning is not only about what has been lost, but also about what remains obscured, misremembered, or never fully known.
As she delves deeper into forgotten family archives and untold maritime histories, Sakellaraki shifts from mourning as a fixed ritual to mourning as a dynamic inquiry. Her practice becomes performative—an ongoing ritual that unearths the psychological sediment left behind by silence, secrecy, and time.
Grief as Sacred Cartography
At its heart, The Truth is in the Soil functions as a sacred cartography—mapping the terrain where sorrow, memory, and myth converge. Ioanna Sakellaraki does not offer closure, nor does she attempt to resolve grief into neatly packaged narratives. Instead, she invites us into a space where mourning is ongoing, where images become offerings, and where silence speaks volumes.
Her work challenges the viewer to see death not as an end, but as a threshold—a passage into deeper engagement with life, ancestry, and meaning. She reminds us that mourning is not something to be overcome, but something to be honored, explored, and shared.
In an age that often rushes toward forgetting, The Truth is in the Soil lingers. It whispers. It waits. And in doing so, it transforms loss into legacy, silence into ritual, and grief into a generative force that binds us across time, culture, and spirit.
Chromatic Shifts and Emotional Resonance
In The Truth is in the Soil, Ioanna Sakellaraki constructs a visual world where color is not merely aesthetic—it becomes emotional terrain. Her project unfolds like a psychological cartography, in which chromatic transitions mark the evolving states of grief, memory, and identity. The earliest images in the series lean heavily into monochrome, echoing the stripped-down quality of first encounters with mourning. These stark tones reflect the emotional bluntness of early loss, where everything feels reduced to contrast—presence versus absence, breath versus silence.
As the series progresses, a transformation occurs. Color seeps in—not with exuberance, but with quiet gravity. Muted reds, stormy blues, fractured golds begin to emerge, often layered like sediment. These colors do not beautify the scenes—they deepen their emotional complexity. They serve as a visual metaphor for the slow internal shifts that happen during grief. Where black-and-white communicates immediacy, color begins to express retrospection—a contemplative gaze that understands loss not only as pain but as a metamorphosis.
Sakellaraki begins each piece with a tactile surface that may resemble worn parchment, weathered skin, or stone etched by time. Into this base she introduces her subjects—figures, landscapes, fragments of cultural objects—and allows them to merge. Her technique combines scanning, analog printing, digital reworking, and hand-layering. It is slow, meditative, and cumulative. Each layer absorbs the one beneath, much like how emotions overlay each other in the human psyche. The final compositions do not present clear narratives. Instead, they offer atmospheres—dense, immersive, evocative of a feeling rather than a scene.
The transformation of these images through repeated intervention becomes symbolic of how grief is processed. Initial sorrow hardens, mutates, and becomes textured with time. Often, the finished image is unrecognizable from its origin, and yet truer to the emotional truth it seeks to articulate. These are not relics of loss—they are its living embodiments.
Visual Lament as Ritual Practice
Sakellaraki’s process echoes the very rituals she investigates. The layering of textures and tonal shifts mimic the rituals of lamentation where repetition, song, and gesture are used to process grief communally. Her visual acts become contemporary rites—silent, solitary, yet filled with ancestral echoes. These rites unfold not in temples or chapels but in her creative process, transforming her work into a space of remembrance and reverence.
Each composition thus becomes its own ceremony. The surfaces she creates are like mourning cloths—stitched with memory, torn with pain, softened with time. Her use of fabric-like textures, cracked surfaces, and spectral overlays suggests that her images are not static portrayals but breathing entities. They live and age alongside the emotions they embody.
This transformation of images over time is not incidental but essential. It represents the cyclical nature of grief—how we return to it, reshape it, and, in doing so, come to understand its presence as something that evolves rather than disappears. In a culture that often seeks closure, Sakellaraki resists that impulse. Instead, she gives space to a mourning that endures—not in despair, but in continuity.
Writing and Image: Parallel Acts of Understanding
Sakellaraki’s engagement with grief does not end at the visual. Her academic and literary inquiry enhances the conceptual depth of her work. Rooted in continental philosophy and literary theory, her writing practice exists in symbiosis with her visual explorations. Rather than serve as captions or explanations, her texts act as extensions of the visual terrain—another way of approaching the ineffable space between memory and death.
Her intellectual influences include figures like Maurice Blanchot, whose reflections on the limits of language and the presence of death deeply inform her approach. Blanchot believed that death resists being made into language—that it lies forever just outside the grasp of articulation. Rather than treat this philosophical impasse as a barrier, Sakellaraki uses it as an opening. Her writing occupies this boundary space, where language strains but still attempts, where thought trembles but does not retreat.
Through her integration of creative writing and theoretical reflection, she constructs a multifaceted space where mourning can be contemplated, not solved. Her writing is not didactic. It invites readers into the ambiguity of grief, where meaning is not declared but discovered—slowly, delicately, and often incompletely.
Symbolic Imagery and Cultural Memory
One of the most resonant features of Sakellaraki’s work is her symbolic vocabulary—imagery that transcends cultural borders while remaining rooted in specific ancestral traditions. Elements such as veils, vessels, open landscapes, and fragmented bodies become recurring visual motifs, each carrying layers of meaning across multiple temporal and emotional registers.
In particular, motifs like the pomegranate—a fruit long associated with death, fertility, and rebirth in Mediterranean cultures—emerge as potent symbols. A simple object becomes a bridge between past and present, personal and collective, sacred and profane. Textiles with intricate patterns, gestures of turned backs, and distant silhouettes also function as carriers of memory. They evoke feelings without anchoring them to fixed narratives, allowing viewers to engage the work through their own subjective experiences.
These symbolic references form a cultural echo chamber within the work. They suggest that grief is not only psychological but architectural—constructed from rituals, beliefs, and visual traditions that have been passed down over generations. In this sense, Sakellaraki becomes an archaeologist of emotion, excavating visual fragments that still resonate with contemporary viewers despite the erosion of formal ritual in many parts of the world.
Collective Grief in a Fragmented World
Although the inspiration for The Truth is in the Soil is intensely personal, the project speaks powerfully to collective mourning in an increasingly fragmented modern society. Sakellaraki’s images do not portray isolated loss. Instead, they evoke the idea that grief is a communal condition—shared not just by families but by nations, generations, and even landscapes.
Her work stands in quiet resistance to the depersonalized nature of modern grieving. In many societies today, mourning has been stripped of its public, participatory elements. The traditions that once provided structure and communal expression are often replaced by fleeting digital gestures or clinical ceremonies. Sakellaraki reclaims grief as a space of connection. Her work insists on slowness, on immersion, on contemplation. It invites a return to the embodied, tactile, and spiritual dimensions of mourning that are increasingly rare.
By invoking rituals that are fading from collective consciousness, she not only documents their remnants but also revitalizes their emotional potency. Her images remind viewers that grief is not something to be hidden, rushed, or resolved—but something to be held, honored, and shared. In this way, The Truth is in the Soil offers an ethical and aesthetic intervention into how we might reimagine collective grieving for the contemporary world.
Grief Across Cultures: A Universal Invocation
Although rooted in the traditions of Greek mourning, Sakellaraki’s work resonates across cultural divides. The emotions she taps into—loss, longing, memory, absence—are universal. Her visual language does not rely on textual specificity but on the deep grammar of human emotion. As such, viewers from around the world recognize something within her images, even if the rituals themselves are unfamiliar.
A mourner turned toward the horizon, a landscape steeped in twilight, a cloth folded on a table—all evoke a sense of solemnity that transcends language. Her use of color, texture, and silence allows each composition to act as an open invitation to memory. It is not important whether a viewer understands the exact cultural references. What matters is that they feel something—a stirring, a resonance, an echo of their own grief or that of their ancestors.
This universal appeal does not dilute the work’s specificity. Rather, it amplifies its significance. By creating from within her cultural heritage while opening space for others, Sakellaraki contributes to a broader global discourse on how we mourn, remember, and reconstruct meaning after loss. Her work is a bridge between the intimate and the infinite.
A Liminal Space for Transformation
Ultimately, The Truth is in the Soil creates a liminal space—a threshold zone between presence and absence, past and present, personal and universal. It is a space where emotions once silenced by time or taboo can reemerge with dignity and weight. Sakellaraki’s art does not seek resolution. Instead, it honors continuation, echo, and transformation.
The work allows for grief to be not only a solitary ache but a shared ritual, an enduring conversation. In a world saturated with instant responses and fleeting expressions, her process—layered, slow, intuitive—offers an alternative rhythm. It asks us to pause, to reflect, to return.
The soil in her title is not just the literal earth into which we bury the dead. It is symbolic of memory, tradition, and the sediment of all that has been lived. Her work sows into that soil new questions about what it means to mourn, to remember, to be shaped by what we’ve lost. And from that symbolic terrain, something enduring begins to grow—not only sorrow, but meaning, resilience, and perhaps even grace.
Inheritance, Secrets, and the Sea: A New Creative Chapter
Sakellaraki’s exploration of mourning has not ended with The Truth is in the Soil. Her current project, Tales of Sea, Lust and Death, continues her thematic investigations but shifts the narrative frame. Drawing upon her late father's maritime records, she unearthed an entire hidden history—including a former spouse and a half-sibling she had never known.
The first installment, The Seven Circuits of a Pearl, reflects on desire, secrecy, and longing, inspired by a pearl necklace seen in an old photograph. Set between Greece and Western Australia, the work interrogates colonial histories and personal mythologies through the symbolic prism of the pearl—a mineral formed through irritation and time.
In the second chapter, Nine Days on the Lizard Reef, Sakellaraki ventures into the coral reefs of northern Australia, tracing narratives of camouflage and family deception. Working with her father’s collection of reptile skins, she weaves natural and familial histories into a narrative of transformation and revelation.
The final part, Twelve Islands through a Peephole, returns her to Greece, where she pieces together the remnants of a life once hidden from her. Through repeated visits, she constructs a visual archive of fragmented memories—some real, others imagined—culminating in a poetic and critical inquiry into legacy and selfhood.
The first part of this trilogy is currently on view at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center until September 8 and at the Benaki Museum for the Athens Photo Festival until July 28.
Final Reflections:
In reflecting on The Truth is in the Soil, it becomes clear that Ioanna Sakellaraki’s work transcends the boundaries of visual art to become a profound meditation on mourning, identity, and cultural continuity. Her artistic practice emerges not just as a response to the death of her father but as a channel through which personal anguish is transformed into collective inquiry. By turning to rituals that have all but disappeared from contemporary Greek life, she doesn’t simply document loss—she reclaims its poetic and spiritual vocabulary for a modern world that often lacks space for grief.
Sakellaraki’s project reveals grief not as a static or isolated state, but as an evolving, porous experience. Through the delicate layering of images and the symbolic language of texture, light, and gesture, she explores how sorrow leaves its imprint not only on the individual psyche but on landscapes, family dynamics, and cultural memory. Her approach suggests that grieving is not something we pass through but rather a condition that redefines our understanding of time, space, and even selfhood.
The way her images blur the line between real and imagined also speaks to the way memory operates—fragmented, elusive, yet emotionally vivid. By combining documentary photographs with manipulated and reimagined compositions, she invites us to experience mourning as a creative act, one capable of making meaning out of what feels most formless and uncertain.
In a broader sense, Sakellaraki’s work underscores the importance of cultural rituals in anchoring us through life’s most destabilizing moments. By engaging with ancient mourning traditions like the Moirologia, she connects the personal with the ancestral, reminding us that grief has always been communal—even when it feels most isolating.
Ultimately, The Truth is in the Soil offers not closure, but communion. It becomes a space where others may see their own stories reflected, even if only through a flicker of recognition. In doing so, Sakellaraki fulfills the highest function of art: to articulate the inexpressible, to give form to feeling, and to allow others to feel less alone in their search for meaning after loss.
