Evgenia Efstathiou 

   I spend all my summers in Leonidio, a small village in Arcadia located on the Southern part of Greece. Knowing that all my four grandparents grew up in that place and that my parents met in that same land, I have always felt a strong, deep connection to the village. For me, Leonidio has always been an escape, a place full of memories and a symbol of my childhood that has created a personal bond with nature. Similarly to the symbolic meaning of the land Arcadia - that represents an earthly paradise - Leonidio for me represents complete freedom and eternal, carefree happiness.

   The goal of this project is to immortalize traditional buildings of Leonidio, a place that has remained unaltered through time. By making palladium prints, the most durable photographic process, I aim at making these structures last in time. On an abstract level, through the preservation of these structures, I also aim at preserving my evanescent memories of my childhood that exist somewhere inside those buildings, in their stories that my grandmother told me, in the walks that I took as a kid.

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