Aristotelis Maragkos

Aristotelis Maragkos: T[he] last D[ays] of my Fa[ther]

Photo: Aristotelis Maragkos

Focusing on the poet’s personal notes and diaries, I will look at the Cavafy Archive in Athens as if C. P. Cavafy was my father, finding fragments of myself within his everyday moments.

My springboard will be “T[he] last D[ays] 1899”, a series of handwritten notes referring to the last days of his mother, Charikleia Cavafy, and the Superfine Writing Pad, a correspondence pad from the period when Cavafy could not speak (1932-1933) due to the tracheostomy he underwent months before his death. The research will lead to an animated essay film, that allows the materiality of the elements to become part of the narration.

The notes will be interpreted by and enriched with fragments from his diaries, poems, photos, and representations of Cavafy in film and media, looking at him as if he occupied different positions in my family constellation. Distorting my memories, I will reveal a paternal C. P. Cavafy that crosses the boundaries of time and create my own fabrication of him. In this imagined familial space, Cavafy’s self-censorship becomes a love for secrecy. The details of his everyday life acquire emotional meaning – details he kept secret from me, or I never found out. After all, how well do we know our parents? And how far do we want to go to get to know them?

Approaching Cavafy as a family member relieves me of the burden of academic research and replaces the respect I feel as a distant admirer of the poet, with the anxiety of uncovering family secrets and the personally driven, dark curiosity that follows. My project aims to discover where the famous Cavafy ends and where our family begins. And within that space I hope we discover ourselves.

In parallel, I will be looking into Chantal Akerman – the renowned filmmaker that dealt with family, identity, and homosexuality – and her book “My Mother Laughs”, documenting her last days with her mother.

Margarita Nikitaki

Creator's Note

My research began by establishing a personal methodology towards archive: investigating tropes to claim traces of C. P. Cavafy as personal, similar to a family heritage, in order to reveal its closest bonds to my heart. For years, my personal work has focused on appropriating material and restructuring it as something new, be it found footage, texts, photographs or drawings. I use paper prints which I reorganize and manipulate into moving paper collages to reveal the emotions under the surface.

My main response to the Cavafy Archive in Athens is one based on obsession, an almost unhealthy relationship with Cavafy’s words, handwriting, daily objects. My approach is not to interpret the poet Cavafy through his work, but instead to “reconstruct” him through his found objects. Working backwards, hence starting from the objects, I turn him into a paternal figure who I have lost somewhere in my memories and I am trying to remember and reconstruct. The Cavafy Archive transforms into a family archive, a house full of memories and objects that carry childhood moments and at points reveal details of him (and myself) I never knew of.My time as an Onassis AiR resident was split in three parts: First came the point of contact with the physical archive, getting to visit and explore the comprehensive collection at the Cavafy Archive space in Athens. Apart from his work, the rich tapestry of correspondence and artistic interpretations of his figure allowed me to adjust myself closer to him.

I quickly dived into specific writings of his that would help me construct my imaginary relationship to him. My entry point were his diaries, getting to understand the rhythm of his family relationships and the details that Cavafy chose to illustrate, which eventually became a guide for my own approach. Informed by other sources, like Chantal Akerman’s book “My Mother Laughs,” I compiled notes on recollecting memories during the last days of a loved one, which would be my point of view throughout this research.

In parallel, I was looking to my actual family archive of Hi8 tapes showing family vacation, birthday events, and school ceremonies, focusing on rediscovering in time my relationship with my actual parents and trying to find shared moments and gestures that would reveal my younger self to me. The collision of the two forgotten figures, my father Cavafy and my teenage self, created a new bond that is instrumental to my approach of the archive—inventing a new relationship based fully on true sources.

Aristotelis Maragkos

The next phase of my work was to interpret this collision through printing frames from the family tapes and copies of objects from the archive (handwritten notes and photos) and creating moving paper collages. I focused on the handwritten notes from Cavafy’s last months, when he was bedridden, illustrated them, and brought them into dialogue with my childhood through the question: What would they mean to me if that was my father’s handwriting? What memories would they evoke? I categorized his notes and constructed imaginary conversations between Cavafy and myself by filling in the gaps—my parts of the discussion and all the awkward pauses. This way of free association based on informed emotions provided me the artifacts, the paper notes themselves, on which I grounded my practice.

For the last phase of my residency, towards the Open Day #11 showcase, I surrounded myself with this printed material and made a series of animated stop motion portraits to illustrate this newfound relationship between Cavafy and myself. Stop motion allows the material to freeze in time, but also reanimates material that were only meant to be still. In my practice, I force the emotion through the contrast of image and movement that manifests my relationship to my father Cavafy.

Throughout my residency, I gave myself time to forge the bonds between my memories and the Cavafy Archive, creating this imagined father-son relationship, while I was also able to experiment with different creative paths, to clarify which ideas worked best, and to turn them into a screenplay. The residency has allowed me to take steps towards the narrative animated film that will be the fully expressed manifestation of my relationship with my father Constantine.