Orestis Athanasopoulos: Flour/Salt/Water

I had found out about the story of Isaac Anispikian or Meraklidis and the alleged origin of the Greek pita a couple of years ago, but I never really got a chance to work on the project until May 2023. Due to a limited amount of time and resources for the scale of the project, I ended up conducting field research as I was finishing up the initial textual research that I had started before the beginning of the residency. Shortly after my arrival in Athens, I embarked on a three-week long trip around the Eastern Mediterranean. Adana, Nicosia, Bethlehem, Alexandria, and Athens. A mix of places where Isaac had lived and places where borders are still very much part of people’s daily lives.

I walked a lot, as I had decided to also test my hypothesis of a shared regional identity empirically. Alone or sometimes with friends who would translate for me, I wandered around these cities trying to understand how someone born in Greece was perceived by the region’s peoples and, inversely, to what extent street level interactions would seem familiar to me.

Looking for bakeries and restaurants was the main purpose or perhaps pretext of the trip, but the random interactions on the street proved to be equally important. Someone would ask me for directions and I would quickly find myself apologizing for not speaking Turkish or Arabic. In Cyprus, my accent would bring about a few indecipherable smirks along with an equally indecipherable “oh you are from Greece”. In Egypt, random people on the street would tell me that I looked like an Egyptian.

More than simply conducting visual research on the modes of production and consumption of various flatbreads, I was putting my own experience to the test. This trip wouldn’t have been possible without the help of my friends and their family members in Turkey, Cyprus, Palestine, Egypt, and Greece, who understood the project in their own ways and helped me find bread.

As my initial hypothesis was being confirmed in ways that I couldn’t have even possibly imagined before embarking on this trip, I was faced with a different set of questions. How could I represent visually the geographic and cultural continuity I experienced without falling into an orientalist, exoticizing trap? I spent no more than a week in each place, which can hardly count as enough time to create any sort of meaningful connection, and despite all the obvious similarities there were also some very visible differences that could lead to haphazard misrepresentations of places and communities that have been generous to me with their food and time and of which I also knew very little about.

I chose to focus on the hands and the tools people use to make and eat bread in the Eastern Mediterranean. The combination of the rhythmic movement of the paddle in the mixing bowl and of the hands kneading the dough, with my own interpretation of Isaac’s story that appears as text over architectural elements of the places I visited, subtly hints at the sense of continuity that I experienced during the trip.

At the end of the two-month period in Athens, the project is still ongoing and will probably change significantly as I continue to delve deeper into the formal and conceptual aspects of the work. Trying to summarize the development of my research without really waiting for the dust to settle will most likely lead to a skewed representation of things that have not yet ripened in my head. However, these are, for what it’s worth, the initial thoughts that stuck with me shortly after I left the Mediterranean for a greener and wetter country where flatbreads can be bought at “oriental” grocery stores or the “exotic” food sections of supermarkets.