view from exhibition ‘Synime/Ambitions’ at National Gallery of Tirana Albania, 2021
Once Upon A Time I Was An Alien Of Hellenic Descent, Now I’m Just An Alien is a large-scale textile installation exploring migration, displacement and the unstable nature of belonging.
The work brings together reproductions of my own paintings, watercolours, drawings, handwritten thoughts and administrative documents, photographed and transferred onto a translucent fabric panel. References to passports, stamps and official classifications sit alongside intimate, hand-made images, placing personal memory in direct conversation with bureaucratic identity.
The title comes from the wording once stamped into my Albanian passport, where I was classified as an “Alien of Hellenic Descent”. The installation reflects on the strange distance between lived identity and the categories imposed by borders and institutions.
Suspended freely in space, the 260 × 150 cm textile can be viewed from both sides. A separate printed watercolour self-portrait sits behind it, becoming visible through the translucent surface. As the viewer moves around the work, images overlap, disappear and reappear.
The work asks what happens to identity when we move between countries, languages and systems of belonging, and what we continue to carry with us when the meaning of “home” changes.
It was originally made for the exhibition Thessaloniki–Venezia: Traces of People, Paths of History (Θεσσαλονίκη–Βενετία: Ίχνη Ανθρώπων, Δρόμοι της Ιστορίας), exhibited in Thessaloniki History Centre and the Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini di Venezia (Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies of Venice) in 2022.
