Altona was written in Hamburg during the winter of 2019. Several things came together; the constant nagging of humidity and the way it reminded me of my childhood summers spent in Northern France, a friend who had been urging me to seriously read Heinrich Heine’s account of his relation to Germany, the sudden realisation I was staying a handful of meters away from Salomon Heine’s house and, in the opposite direction, of the Jewish cemetery, a mysterious attraction to the city’s statues. The result is a tripartite idiosyncratic cartography, starting out as a gothic remembrance of one of my grandfathers, then becoming a bus trajectory following the statues of the city and ending up with my ways to love Heine.

Dago emerges from within Mountain Ash trees, Tasmania devils and the Kathario waterfall in Macedonia, between oceans and islands with impossible names.

It deals with the death of a nineteen-year-old Greek immigrant in Tasmania in 1956, at a time when Australia’s immigration policy was still openly racist. A few years ago, in his eighties, Father spoke of his brother for the first time, articulating his name. Until then, the name had never been spoken. The text is primarily a reflection on the unspoken name, a name that is commonly encountered and constantly avoided. Avoiding the name of the dead is also part of the customs of the people of Tasmania (and the whole of Australia): the phenomenon is called ‘avoidance speech’ by ethnolinguists. Starting from this coincidence, but also from others that emerge along the way from audio and visual documents of the time, the text also makes an exploration of the encounter between the almost exterminated Blacks of Tasmania and the Greeks who arrive there in 1956 as other Blacks.

The word Dâgo is an invention and comes from the pejorative name Dago (from Diego) that was applied to Hispanic, Portuguese, Italian and sometimes Greek immigrants to the USA. Rarely, it was also used in Australia, where the most common name for the Greeks was Wog.

After the text was written, it was worked on orally and musically as a live performance. In April 2024 it was exhibited as a sound installation at the Islahane museum in Thessaloniki and will be exhibited in Athens in 2025.

La idea de Berlín/The Idea of Berlin is an object that gives in to the temptation of disappearance not as death wish but as a way of removing oneself from a certain subject position, be it linguistic, gendered, skin-based, and even historical-political. Strongly influenced by Fred Moten’s political-poetic admonition to refuse the visibility of subjection, and my own grasp of the desire to disappear as well as the advancing white patches on my skin, this bilingual book erases half of its original text. Visually, it is made of gaps and text, on alternating black and white pages. Content-wise, it navigates through issues raised by maternity, multilinguism, ex-static thinking or en-static thinking, South/North, and the colony.

Colony explores the relation between aesthetics and history, and more specifically, the refusal of origins and identity. The book as a whole attempts to question the idea that a voice and recognisability is what sustains a solid poetic discourse; the logic ascribing invented narrative to prose and a concern with the intimate and the real to poetry; and the impermeability of historical narrative by moments of suspension of time. Thus, to give an example, the first section of the book juxtaposes short poetic prose scenes set in a former colony (which sound like fiction, but are actually rooted in experience) with fragments of supposedly traditional Greeks songs of mourning (which are wholly invented, and whose traditional rhythm is slightly altered in order to question their naturalness): the juxtaposition is what matters here, as the circuit between old and new, inherited and invented, aesthetic and historical not only has effects through time but also through space.

Exile is a book investigating the possibility that the exilic condition might be some kind of refuge – that the refugee might be at home elsewhere. It takes its source in the opposition to nostalgia and to historical and mythical conditioning, without renouncing an alternative ‘we’.

I’m grateful to Christopher Cozier who allowed the use of his powerfully evocative Castaway for the book’s cover.

Blind Spot is a collective reflexion on the issue of wandering in metaphorical or actual darkness. The blind spot can be defined as that which cannot be seen but which we know is there: that which is coming towards us and towards which we go without discerning it; that which is played out in hypothetical but existing mode behind our back; that which was there, in front of our eyes, all the time but which we never noticed; that which might bring us towards greater knowledge but escapes us in the present; that which allows us to escape by refusing it. The different viewpoints of this collaboration pick up different starting points, such as Schubert´s Winterreise, or the blotch and the stain in painting. Blind Spot was performed at the ESMUC in Barcelona on 28.06.2019, and at the Warburg Haus in Hamburg on 17.10.2019. The poems also travelled to the festival Voix d´Exils in August 2019.
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The book with poems by, among others, Olvido García Valdès, Chantal Maillard, Dimitra Kationi, Danae Sioziou, Jean-Yves Bériou, Susana Rafart, Pere Gimferrer, was the natural continuation of the Festival del Sur that I organized in Barcelona in December 2015. The translations into Spanish are by Ernest Marcos, Pepe García-Vázquez and Pau Sabaté, Darío Acebales and Christos Siorikis.

‘The only guidelines provided to the poets I approached for the preparation of this anthology were disorientation and the search for the South – two themes that have helped me to find my bearings for some years now. They agreed to repeat each of their exiles, each of their Souths, in common; they agreed to allow their poems to wander together with those of others.

The structure of the volume puts its theme into practice: to turn things upside down. It begins with the outcome, which is destiny, using its two meanings of fate and destination (in Greek, the word γραφτό was used, which means text and destiny). In the search for the South, prone to disorientation, prone to exile, the only certain thing we have is the text and its shadow, destiny, which together open us to poetry. The latter is a form of survival. There also lurks the idea of the poetic state as a (parenthetic outcome), as if everything that is not parenthesis were not linear, or as if, even if it looks linear, what is written actually inhabits somewhere else, in the parentheses.

The second part of the book includes poems whose theme is transition : without it, arrival is not possible. Here the imaginary opposition between South and North is explicit, and it is approached from different perspectives. Movement and travel are omnipresent, whether the poem focuses –and, naturally, becomes– on the bearer or on the medium as transit, or whether it uses an angel’s wing to traverse whatever is necessary: trains, cars, love (also a medium, and what a medium!), navigation.

(translated from the prologue)

Read a sample (Greek/Spanish)