Project K
Every door an entrance. One entrance and one exit. Every room a story. The past and present gather in the center of each room. Behind closed doors, windows open and dust glides on the wood levels, accumulates, becomes a hill in vinyl, in books, in stale flowers. When unfamiliar faces came into this house, they didn't just steal material stuff; they stole a piece of family history. They stole memories. In a perpetual labyrinth of bureaucracy, I struggled to bring balance to the past and the present. And the only thing I felt every time was a burden beating me up, like one of the doors of the house was falling on me...
Project K—taking its initial title from Kafka's The Castle and an intimate, hidden layer of personal naming—deals with the complex ritual of family inheritance within a bureaucratic landscape. Following the sudden loss of my parents, returning to my childhood home in Kypseli meant confronting not only a changed neighborhood and a house frozen in time, but a Kafkaesque maze of paperwork, legal demands, and spatial alienation.
When the locked house was broken into, the resulting chaos did not merely scramble objects—it fractured a living domestic archive. The photographs of the violated interior, placed in official brown envelopes alongside personal texts on a bureaucrat's desk during the initial installation at Grace, set up a tension between rigid public archiving and vulnerable private trauma. Linear grids of doors, archive spaces, and formal portraits contrast with the raw emotional texture of lost childhood rooms.
Project K is an ongoing, living body of work. Currently re-curated and expanding into a self-published art book titled Domestic Archives (published by Zoetrope), the project re-approaches this personal history with a renewed visual structure—standing as an enduring tribute dedicated to the memory of my parents.
Developed within the "Dust Breeding" masterclass, curated by Yorgos Karailias and Yorgos Prinos, and originally exhibited as a site-specific installation at Grace (Athens).