- Self-published 2026
- Softcover, 1st edition, 64p with poetry booklet
- New
“It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember”.
Bessel Van Der Kolk
Vis Absoluta: A Human’s Tale is an ongoing project about my brother’s PTSD, intergenerational trauma, survival and resilience. “Nobody wants to remember trauma (B.Van Der Kolk)”, but in my case, trauma runs through my family for at least three generations. My grandad Yannis was a Greek prisoner of WW2, a slave labour in Mauthausen concentration camp. He survived but never told his story. It was alcohol that helped him forget and soothed his troubled mind. And then it’s my brother Yannis, who survived a horrific cave accident in the Devil’s Cave, where his best friend fell to his death. They had the wrong map; they were young and naive. After the accident my brother suffered in silence, and just like my grandad, he self-medicated with alcohol, smoking, etc.
This book revisits fragments of their story. The facts (newspaper article and prisoner ID) have been printed on newsprint paper and wrap around the main book. The paper will eventually wriggle and dissolve. What remains once the actual story has been told? The memory of it, the emotions, and the myths. Images of caves, family archives, Sisyphus, Orpheus and Euridice myths, dendrites, trees, owls, snakes; they all intermix and interconnect in my storytelling.
This is a book about family trauma, deeply personal and exponentially global. A poetry booklet is included, with poems that function as observational notes. After all, I am the younger sister, and I observe from a safe distance. To understand the poems, one needs to read them under the prism of small Cretan village cultural references, family ties and Greek traditions and superstitions.
Spiro-bound handmade softcover half wrapped in folded newspaper with accompanying poetry booklet.
Signed copy.
