Yannis Makridakis: People, Drops

The project involves long and in-depth research into the personal everyday of people whose quotidian life and work are a vital part of a UNESCO-protected feature of the world’s intangible cultural heritage.

In other words, the project studies how the small, ordinary, and personal is transformed under the right conditions – in our case through the uniqueness and diachronic preciousness of mastic resin – into the sublime, timeless, and universal, and to what extent this transfiguration becomes consciousness by its bearers.

For this purpose, Yannis Makridakis is transfigured into a mastic producer, becomes a member of the local cooperative, and is initiated into the traditional cultivation of mastic resin and the social habits of the mastic villages of Chios, with the aim of being inspired by this magical aspect of the place, i.e. by the fact that the personal lives of its people constitute drops in the uninterrupted flow of a piece of universal cultural heritage with a history of 2500 years.

The project led to the writing of a novel entitled “Ippopotamoi sintrofias” (Companion Hippos) published by Estia in 2024.