The series Local Narratives explores the relationship between memory, place, and collective experience through the encounter of photographic archives with the urban landscape of Florina. The project was developed during the postgraduate program Visual Arts and Landscape and focuses on the neighborhood of the building “Diethnes,” a landmark of the interwar period in the city.
Old photographs from the archive of the people of Pisoderi are projected onto neoclassical and eclectic buildings in the area. The figures reappear in the spaces where they once lived, worked, and moved, creating a hybrid landscape in which past and present coexist.
“Diethnes,” which today houses the Florina Cultural Club, functioned for decades as a hotel—a place of meeting, hospitality, and social life. The historical stratification of the building, as well as that of the surrounding architecture, operates as an active carrier of memory. Human figures are projected onto the weathered surfaces like ghosts, not as nostalgic representations, but as a reactivation of space.
The projection took place in the public realm and became a collective experience: passersby stopped, observed, and engaged in conversation. The city was temporarily transformed into a site of narration. The final trace of this experience is the photograph— a new landscape composed of materials from both the past and the present, near and distant.
