The nursing home is a hive of stories that hum and connect the past with the present as they struggle to find their place in the future in an ever-changing world.
An elderly woman wanders alone in a nursing home corridor, surrounded by silence. The staircase on her left seems to lead somewhere, yet she remains anchored in the present. In her solitude, her image becomes a symbol of time standing still, as dementia clouds her perception, leaving behind only fragmented memories.
An elderly woman, a former tour guide, sits alone in a wooden chair, writing in a book. The scattered books around her reveal her yearning to connect with a world that seems to have forgotten her. Behind her, another resident stands in silence, while a television plays by itself, accentuating the solitude that fills the space. Her books are her last window to communication and the life she once knew.
Music, reading, photography, painting, and all forms of art speak to the human memory in a direct dialogue. The creative dimension of humanity is timeless and ageless; we can all create art, without exception.
An elderly woman wanders alone in a nursing home corridor, surrounded by silence. The staircase on her left seems to lead somewhere, yet she remains anchored in the present. In her solitude, her image becomes a symbol of time standing still, as dementia clouds her perception, leaving behind only fragmented memories.
The photographic image is a frozen moment in time. The photographs of the nursing home residents, as a whole, speak of a time that is dilated, even stopped.
The rituals of personal care are perhaps the only signs of time still flowing within the nursing home. Conversely, the space contracts due to immobilization. Functional objects are now minimal. A doll, a drawing, a comb acquire the weight of an entire material world.
I could not avoid the thought of decay. Aging serves as the photographic vehicle of my concern. The residents, standing at the threshold of death, want to play, to reintroduce themselves, to be liked. They flirt, they groom themselves. Equally, I could not avoid the thought that we become children again.
I “saw” this project as a study of time. My photographs led me to explore the boundary between existence and non-existence.
Thus, I was led to investigate human theories of time as a passage. Whether time is an illusion, another dimension, whether every moment in the past, present, and future is equally “real,” whether time is eternal, or whether only the present and our momentary perception of it exist.
It seemed to me that the nursing home's cast is existentially trapped in a temporal wormhole. What we think of as death might be a temporal distortion. That is why this cast grooms themselves, why they play; they seem to know something more than we do.
Project description
They have transfigured into their next selves and acquired traits of decay yet, strangely, also traits of incorruptibility, in terms of eternity. This version of themselves belongs to another time; it is otherworldly.The rift of time, beyond every class, ideological, professional, or temperamental division, is our common fate. It represents our postmodern collectivity, which hurtles technologically and ideologically toward immortality and sometimes behaves as if it has already achieved it.
By introducing myself as an observer into a community, small or large, distinctly separated from the rest of society, I encountered subjects living on the fringes of society—either out of necessity, choice, or pseudo-choice. These subjects develop characteristics of confinement and operate as Kafkaesque casts against the irrevocable terms of a system that is sometimes paradoxical, sometimes bizarre, sometimes dark.
They raise questions we avoid facing. For instance, how have we as a society accepted the way we treat the elderly? Are we in harmony with our traditions so far? What does this mean for our culture?
Award
Second prize in the annual Photojournalism Award for
professional photographers 2024 "Athens Photo World Award".
Songs of love and youth