ARIS GEORGIOU
ARISTOTELOUS 6, TEN YEARS AGO

On 1 April 1981, ten years ago, my grandmother died. I was thirty. She was born in 1905, and diabetes and Parkinson’s disease had been her chief afflictions for the last thirty years: not ignoble diseases, like cancer, but by no means negligible either. She fought back stubbornly, not out of any desire for heroics but because she needed to live. She very rarely let herself go, and then only briefly, after some emotional blow. In her last two years she started having strokes, which became more frequent towards the end, though fortunately they were not the calvary they might have been. She went to hospital several times in that final period; the last time, she never came home. Once or twice I went with her myself in the ambulance, a distressing experience; the end was in sight by then. Capitulation palpably before me, I found myself thinking about it for the first time, imagining scenarios starring myself as the hero of old age. Grief and preoccupation warred constantly with everyday concerns and the natural optimism of a thirty-year-old.

Ioannis Epaminondas
A Present Absence

(Aris Georgiou, 6 Aristotelous Street: Ten Years Ago, Diagonios Publications, Thessaloniki 1992)

Eighteen photographs of an apartment built in the fifties, a three-part text, and the poetry of the photographer and author, who, step by step, object by object, describes, remembers, analyses and unfolds a personal tale: the story of his grandmother’s home, which he photographed himself shortly before her death, just as it was, clothed with objects, photographs, and her own warm presence. Now, ten years later, through the fragments of his memory, and above all through the immobilised images he has salvaged like specks of gold, he conjures up his relationship with the woman who once existed and to whom this book is dedicated. The myth is brought to completion slowly, piece by piece, and the grandmother’s image is reconstructed through the things she herself touched and the rooms to which she gave the breath of life. It is significant that she is absent from nearly all the photographs; but when she appears towards the end, her image is already familiar to us, built up in the pages which have gone before.