Periklis Alkidis

The autobiographical genre suggests a context for most of the work of Periklis Alkidis, including the series “A Family Story.” Such projects are uniquely special for their authors, not only because they afford the possibility of a somewhat self-indulgent recreation of the past, but because they also permit a continuation, a move from present to future. “A Family Story” is a process of self-discovery into a halfremembered, half-invented past: based on fragments of memories, Alkidis attempts to reveal previously hidden information, feelings and memories. The project can be seen as a desire to deal, at least partially, with these memories by fictionalising them. Overall, Alkidis explores both his childhood and adultness experience combining old family snapshots and letters together with his own personal recollections and comments on events depicted or mentioned in a dramatic performance of hidden relations and covert emotions. Feelings of inadequacy, isolation, and fear, together with those of love and tenderness, become eventually apparent to expose what might be hidden beneath the surface of a seemingly innocent family snapshot. The project, thus, presents us with a uniquely subjective exploration of emotions, memory and personal identity itself, putting photographs in the practices of therapy. In this context, ‘I remember, therefore I am’, could well provide the equivalent of Descartes’s ‘cogito ergo sum’. Yet, given the fallible, selective, and manipulative nature of memory this could become ‘I choose what I remember, therefore I control who I am’.

Penelope Petsini