Eleni Kamma in collaboration with Christos Vogiatzis (1957–2023)

At fifteen, my uncle Christos became fascinated with Algebra’s hooks. With a ballpoint pen, he drew endless variations of two hooks that intersect, filling the intersections with the blue ink. Christos called his drawings “The Dancers”, and fifty years later, he still continued making them, by way of enabling himself to return to his ‘center’. The publication Pink Days and Blue Νights (The Dancers) is an artist book that takes as a point of departure a dialogic collaborative work between myself and my uncle Christos Vogiatzis, who passed away in the autumn of 2023, following a five years struggle with cancer.

Pink Days and Blue Νights (The Dancers) explores themes of loss, memory and time, opening up questions around experiencing vulnerability and the transformative processes that take place when we make the private public. It invites the reader to an intergenerational conversation that brings together my uncle’s (an amateur’s) drawings and words, my own (those of a contemporary visual artist), as well as my personal diary notes on Bourgeois’ quotes and on Didion’s books The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, in which she documents the grief she experienced following the death of her loved ones. In doing so, the publication contextualizes family within an atypical, extended, idiosyncratic understanding of kinship: coming together to share our own feelings and references as a group that deepen our understanding of loss.

Throughout Pink Days and Blue Νights (The Dancers) the notion of repetition appears through various timelines. The abstract, geometrical shapes created by my uncle cover a time span of 50 years. They appear almost unaltered and remain fresh, both in his 1975 geometry schoolbook and again in our dialogical project of 2023. Then there is the timeline of our dialogical work which includes the drawings discussed and created between May and December 2023, the repetition of the empty pink numbered pages which my uncle never completed as illness took over, my efforts to complete the work after he was gone. These timelines blend and overlap with another timeline, this of feeling and thinking loss through—quoting, re-membering, re-reading, re-drafting, re-writing on,... —Bourgeois’ notes to her self and Didion’s books, during the painful process of coming to terms with my uncle’s loss and letting go.

Finally, there is the timeline of daring to lose and re-find oneself along these lines.