The Mermaid Madonna

Since February 2015, more than 850,000-recorded refugees have crossed over from Turkey onto the 15km stretch of coast on the northern side of the island of Lesbos, in the northeastern Aegean Sea in Greece. This project s titled after the book, The Mermaid Madonna (1955) by the acclaimed Lesbos born writer, Stratis Myrivilis.

The story takes place in the fishing village of Skala Sikaminias, one of the main entry points for refugees today. It is set in the 1920’s when this region witnessed its first wave of refugees during the forced population exchange between Greece with Turkey on the exact same coastline. At that time over 50,000 Greeks settled on Lesbos, many of which have emained on the north side of the island.

A majority of the village population today descend directly from refugees from the above mentioned population exchange. Due to the lack of imminent action from the Greek government and the European Union in 2015, the locals were the first to help refugees land safely and provide food and shelter. Their lives were severely disrupted as they were also forced to face the memories of their own family histories. This drove me to start a project driven stylistically by the magical realistic narrative of the text while examining the historical repetition of mass transitory movement on this coastline, and what role social memory plays in the permanence of landscape, questioning how physical environments may be continuous stages for different states of displacement.