Category: Interviews

📚📚Where does poetry meet #psychology? Where do personal micro-stories meet the collective #History of the world?

Dr. Yiorgos Samoilis spoke to Reading Greece about his latest #poetry collection "Τa fyl(l)a" (Τhraka, 2023), his poetic language and the interrelation between the personal and the collective in his work.

"It is inevitable that the personal becomes embedded in my writing. I write from a place of subjectivity, my understanding of myself, the world, and those around me. I am both embodied and embedded, an Aristotelian social animal. Therefore, in my work, the personal cannot escape its encounter with the social and the cultural. For me, the creation of a poem entails a moment of encounter: my perceptual system takes something in-let’s say an object-and, through the construction of language and the use of imagination, transforms it into something different (sometimes beyond the conventional or the normative). In addition, as a social being, I am also a by-product of the collective, situated at this particular point in time and place. Thus, the personal, the cultural, and the sociological all come together to form a dish, a kind of soup, as I like to think of it composed of many ingredients thrown into a pot, my brain. I am not certain whether the dish is entirely edible, but I have done my best to stir its contents at the time when this collection was written".

10 new projects join the #CycladicIdentity Initiative by the @CycladicMuseum. Launched in 2023, it now supports 26 projects across 11 islands to help local communities protect & promote Cycladic heritage that connects past, present, and future

Takis Mavrotas is a distinguished Greek art critic, curator and writer whose career has been devoted to illuminating the dialogue between artists and audiences. Currently the Director of the Visual Arts Program at the B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation, he has curated countless exhibitions in Greece and abroad. His thoughtful approach has earned him recognition from prestigious institutions such as the Academy of Athens.