Third-generation visual refugees from Asia Minor, Pontus, Propontis, and Eastern Thrace refer to the experience of loss as a long process of purification and self-definition. Their works form the basis of the “Uninhabited Places of the East” exhibition, which is on display until September 1st at the Municipal Gallery of Thessaloniki – Casa Bianca.

“The exhibition does not refer to vague forms of history, but to (still) clearly recorded experiences of persecution and refugees, insofar as they are associated with the distant birthplace of ancestors and insofar as they were taken as memories by posterity.” , curators Yannis Ziogas and Stella Silayou note.

Transgenerational “trauma” is washed away through the “memory cleansing process”. A complex process as it involves the life cycles and journeys of refugees and next generations in lost places and in reclaimed places in a constant merging of real and borrowed memory.

The exhibition is also “a tribute to the memory of those who either died then or died in places settled later”.

Photographer Leah Nalbandidou, one of the visual artists participating along with Giannis Ziogas, Dimitra Lazaridou, Michalis Manousakis, Virginia Mastrogiannakis, Giorgos Tsakiris and Petros Christoulias, says that “as a descendant of families who have experienced displacement from places of origin such as East Limniski Thrace, Constantinople, Pontiyskaya Fatsa and Kerch on the Crimean peninsula”, seeks “through visual research” to process “the emotional imprint of loss and especially lack of belonging.”

Her work, Entymion Thessaloniki: Kavak Sugiu, Black Water, Unknown Words and The Sooner the Better (2022), consists of many photo prints and a video that she created in collaboration with Justini Draculako.

The exhibition explores all aspects of identity and embodied uprooting assimilation and attempts a broad and deep reconstruction through visual language. We are looking forward to the event on August 31 at the exhibition site (at 19.00), which will be opened by an online presentation by Nikos Daskalakis (Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Neurodiagnostics and Translational Bioinformatics Laboratory of McLean Hospital, Member of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard) on the topic ” Genetic bases of transgenerational transmission of traumas”.

This will be an introduction to the process of reading works with the participation of artists and AUTH Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry – Child Psychiatry Grigoris Ambatsoglu.