Memories and Songs in the Ruins

Artist Anna Saloustrou, who was a resident of I. Makraki Street when she was a child, the same street where her workshop can now be found, entered the ruins of the neighborhood.

She first went inside the old tutoring center of the area and the adjacent houses. There, she found tins of oil and butter; rain boots and torn trainers; electricity meters; remnants of daisy-filled tiles from the 30s; a stroller from the 70s; window frames without the glass; broken swinging doors.

She named the ruins “Hal-Asmata”, i.e. the songs of the ruins, and took a can of red paint to follow in the footsteps of her Mentor. She found the nails on the multidimensional indigo, ocher, and white wall and followed them.

She pulled the thread and discovered the lives of Manousos and Lefkothea, she tied it on the broken back of the chair, and went straight to the door.

In the narrow alley outside, she tied doors and windows with ropes, lifting them high over the ground, fixed in a vacuum and looking up at the sky – windows to a dream perhaps? Or doors to the future?

– I found the strangest thing, says Anna. A safety pin buried in the ground; it was one of those old ones that fastened a baby’s swaddling clothes. And then I hung small stones with it, like textile weights, at the end of the thread.

A safety pin, I thought, that holds the thread of Memory. Can that same thread weave our tomorrow as well? Who knows…

The daughter of Anna’s mentor, Artemis, also a philologist, brought her father’s voice in an old tape recorder reading Malakasis’ poem “Batarias”. It almost sounded like it was written for him: “As your voice sat at the table and resonated far, / oh great Batarias, / the third glass of wine birthed birds of paradise / and nightingales that woke up on the branches.”

And then night fell. A towering crane stood out in the sky as a monstrous building was being constructed on the adjacent plot. What will remain of all this?  Let us simply allow the words to take the floor, and then… who knows…

Niki Troulinou, Novelist, Author, Authors’ Journal, 29,30-07-2017

https://www.efsyn.gr/arthro/mnimes-kai-hal-asmata