The Truth is in the Soil

(Hardback)

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After the death of her father, Sakellaraki's photography emerged as a passageway to navigate her personal grief. The project evolved to explore collective mourning in Greek society, ancestral rituals, private trauma and the passage of time-inspired by the last female communities of mourners in the Mani peninsula of Greece. 'In the wake of witnessing loss globally within our cultures and civilisations, I want to stimulate the viewer to rethink mortality through this imagined path of departure onto a new landscape. ..The Truth is in the Soil, reflects on how my personal story has transformed into a collective narrative of loss aiming at contributing to the collection of tales of human struggle for meaning. To me, these images work as vehicles for mourning perished ideals of vitality, prosperity and belonging, attempting to tell something further than their subjects by creating a space where death can exist.'

Author Bio

Ioanna Sakellaraki (b.1989) is a Greek visual artist and researcher. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people. She was recently awarded a Doctoral Scholarship for undertaking her PhD in Art after graduating from an MA Photography from the Royal College of Art. She is the recipient of The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award 2018 and was named Student Photographer of the Year by Sony World Photography Awards 2020. In 2019, she was awarded with the Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant in Tokyo and the International Photography Grant Creative Prize. Nominations include: the Inge Morath Award by Magnum Foundation in USA, the Prix HSBC, the Prix Levallois and the Prix Voies Off in France. Her work has been exhibited internationally in art festivals and galleries with recent solo shows at Belfast Exposed Gallery and at the European Month of Photography in Berlin. Her projects have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker and journals including The Guardian and Deutsche Welle. She has been invited as a guest speaker in the Martin Parr Foundation and the London Institute of Photography