Story:

I am a performance artist and a video artist. I studied painting – well, that’s one thing  I studied… and then many other things. I ended up using my body to express myself. Or rather, it’s not that I ended up doing that, I think I’ve always used my body to express myself, to be honest. 

In this stage of my life, I use other means to develop my thoughts and my creative energy, which is psychoanalysis, and especially how psychoanalysis and attachments work at a really early age, in infants and babies, and at this time mainly in a woman’s life, which is the prenatal and postnatal condition. This is my current field of study, through which I express my thoughts and fantasise. It’s been some time.

So, I have this item with me, which I’ve always had with me. It’s my earrings. They’re really old earrings. It’s really interesting how Western people believe our psyche works. It’s related to grief and how narcissism acts because of grief and losses in early ages. So, for me, this is a symbolic item, related to my grandmother who is still alive, but not really present mentally. She is 91.

She was a very central part of my life, because she gave me all the love I have as a person – it’s her work. And it’s a very interesting item, because my grandmother really, really loved me, because she thought I was her son. Amazing story. She lost her son, that is, my father, and I really looked like my father. So, my grandmother decided that I was my father, and she kept approaching me as if I were him. I think she still does. This summer, she did that in public in front of other people. It was very difficult to cope with all this grief.

So, at some points in my life, I decided to forgo myself to do her the favour of existing as a male dynamic figure, or something. Since last year, because I think she thinks she’s dying – she is in a delirious state – she keeps giving me trinkets, whatever she finds in the house. We have this dowry mentality in Greece. She gave me these earrings, which are her daughter’s – there is a daughter. She actually stole them from her, from my aunt.

I feel that this is my talisman of some sort. I can’t imagine what will happen if I lose these earrings. They’re my refuge.

– Eleni Tsamadia