Story:

This pillow is the first handiwork that my mother did, when she was a teenager. She must have done it while she was still at the village, before coming to Athens. It’s 70, if not more, years old. It has travelled from Garantza, Ano Melpeia, probably. In Messinia. After that, it travelled to Larisa, where my mother married my father. It was used daily, my sister and I would play with it, pee on it, later it became my children’s cushion, my son’s, my sister’s daughters would use it… Imagine that my son is now 36 years old, again everyday use. 5-6 years ago, my mother gave it to Vaggelio, my wife, and I, she said take it, I’m not using it anymore, but it’s important to me.

It’s a story that I don’t know and I never will – where are the threads from, for instance, because it’s a mountain village. A story that, in all likelihood, I am constructing myself to a certain degree, and the construction of the story gives me the impression of a day-to-day change. Also, I will never know the story because, although my mother is alive, other than the fact that she’s been blind for the past years, she is also at the last stage of Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t recognise anything anymore, no matter what I show her, she won’t see it, it won’t remind her anything. So I decided to bring it here.

For as long as the colours and threads are still there, it will be in use. We sit on it, we support our back with it, I support my back on it when I sit on my desk, it’s not that we’re preserving it somewhere. We’re not preserving it. It’s been in use for 70 years. It was made, the earliest, in ’53.

– Vasilis Apostolopoulos