The Truth is in the Soil

The Truth is in the Soil by Ioanna Sakellaraki is a 5-year exploration of grief as an elegy to her
father and the dying tradition of mourning in Greece.

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After the death of her father, Sakellaraki's photography emerged as a passageway to navigate her personal grief. The project evolved to explore collective mourning in Greek society, ancestral rituals, private trauma and the passage of
time-inspired by the last female communities of mourners in the Mani peninsula of Greece.

'In the wake of witnessing loss globally within our cultures and civilisations, I want to stimulate the
viewer to rethink mortality through this imagined path of departure onto a new landscape. ..The
Truth is in the Soil, reflects on how my personal story has transformed into a collective narrative
of loss aiming at contributing to the collection of tales of human struggle for meaning. To me,
these images work as vehicles for mourning perished ideals of vitality, prosperity and belonging,
attempting to tell something further than their subjects by creating a space where death can exist.'