The project unfolds between Athens and Folegandros starting in 2020 and follows the traces of a suicide in the early 20th century. On May 5, 1901, the educator of Folegandros took his life in a central hotel room in Athens after a month-long stay at the Municipal Hospital of Athens due to tuberculosis, unwilling to transmit the disease. The motivation for the project was the open suicide letter of Stylianos Balmetakis, discovered through the research of Academia Romantica.
The project ventures into a heterochronic visual approach to the ultimate form of communication with the world-delivering a message that inevitably remains unanswered as its author has departed. Through a metaphorical narrative about an immersive act, I create a space of reflection around the moment when life becomes unpleasant and its prolongation renders it futile. How can we face the absurd and create an experience of the world that is open to both its beauty and its brutality?
Bio: Eirini Androulaki (b.1990) lives and works in Athens. She graduated from the Department of Political Science and History at Panteion University in Athens and completed her studies in Cinema with an MA in History & Media in Paris, where she worked as a documentalist of photographic and audiovisual collections until 2019. She completed a series of seminars at Photo Circle and the Hellenic Centre for Photography and is currently studying at the Department of Photography and Audiovisual Arts at the School of Applied Arts and Culture of the University of West Attica.
