λεμόνι lemon ليمون citron (2024)
audio installation, 55:01
(lemóni lemon lymun citron)
This sound-based work was created as part of the EU project PROSPER’s Evia Residency in October 2024. I wanted to explore the connection between food, place, and memory. Though we may lose places in many ways—war, politics, climate change, migration, time—they live on in our stories. During a series of recorded interviews over local produce, participants narrate memories that resurface with each bite, transporting us to places frozen in time.
This project aims to map out memories of such places, and how they might be resurrected. How taste and place are connected. How grief and climate change intertwine. How, through all of this, memory becomes an indestructible force.
Throughout this residency, I conducted these interviews with locals restoring their lands in southern Evia through regenerative farming techniques. Over small bowls of local produce—lemon, prickly pear, pomegranate, rosemary, olives, and more—together we ate the foods one by one.
In these recorded sessions, we explore these memories in their mother tongues or languages of preference (Greek, Arabic, English, French). Memory comes from a deep place, and I wanted the most direct experience possible.
This odd synesthetic approach is meant to mimic the patchwork quality of memory.
Visitors are invited to rest in the provided hammocks or chairs, to gaze out at the sea and let the sounds of memory wash over them—to remember/resurrect their own lost places.
Photography by Orestis Seferoglou