Anthoula Lelekidis

Fragments of Diaspora centers around themes of identity, migration, and the desire to uncover one’s roots. After collecting a wide range of photos from family albums in New York and Greece, I began to deconstruct and rejoin various moments of time and place, both literally and figuratively. Collaging has become a process for me to create photographs without the use of a camera and lends itself perfectly to the formal qualities found in everyday domestic snapshots. The physicality of the technique stays true to the era that these photos were pulled from - the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The lives of the diaspora are filled with a deep yearning for home, and the need to create a life away from it. By combining my own photographic fragments with family photographs, reassembling, and reworking them in the process, I construct new images that bridge the gap between temporalities and evoke the consequences of relocation. My process includes research and reassembling images, followed by intuitively tearing apart prints and re-combining them in unexpected ways. These physical rips are a metaphor for the splitting of families who fled from their homeland due to war or poverty. The images depict symbols of cultural traditions and family bonds, while the process of collage signifies feelings of displacement and isolation.

Anthoula Lelekidis is a Greek-American lens-based artist who utilizes photography and photographic collage to navigate themes of personal memory, loss, and migration. With a deep interest in the archive, she reworks family photos to uncover a deeper tie to ancestral roots within blank spaces of her recollection. She holds a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design and received the Community Fellowship from the International Center of Photography from 2018 to 2020. In 2016, Lelekidis was a resident at the Skopelos Foundation of the Arts in Skopelos, Greece, and earned a scholarship from the Students On Ice Organization to travel to photograph Antarctica in 2006.

website: anthoulalelekidis.com

Instagram: @anthoulalelekidis