Title: The Bird Who Came From Afar: A Living Archive of Voice, Language & Myth
My creative practice has never been about a single medium. It is about movement: between lands, between tongues, between selves. In this documentation project, I reflect not only on how I present my work but on what my work reveals about how I see the world and my place within it.
Through the poetic persona of The Bird Who Came From Afar, I have created a mythic avatar through which all my work passes. The bird is a migrant soul, a traveller across borders, time, and memory. It is both me and not me.
My poems such as “Aeolus and Nausicaä”, “The Rear Sea (She) Shell”, “The Penelope (in Me)”, and “Marble (Marvel)” have formed the central axis of this phase of my creative journey. These are not just poems but forms of living documentation: records of emotional states, mythic references, linguistic experimentations (as seen in my play with “GrenGLISH”), and explorations of displacement, love, rupture, and return.
“I walked through tempests with no stars to chart,
Each shore a question, every bed a test…”
(*from “The Penelope (in Me)”)
I have chosen to present my work as a layered digital scroll, drawing influence from oral storytelling, epic poetry, and contemporary zine culture. Using Google Drive, I have organised my visual poems, sketches, drafts, and audio readings into a curated archive with considered file names, reflecting both chronology and thematic clustering.
Rather than documenting my work as finished, I have embraced the unfinishedness of poetic practice. Like Odysseus, like Penelope, like the Bird Who Came From Afar, I am always in transit.
Design Decisions & Artist Influences:
My documentation draws visual influence from artists like Etel Adnan, Andy Warhol, Banksy, Basquiat, and Xu Zhimo, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, along the Greek Seferis, Elytis, Cavafy, Nikos Kavvadias as well as Homer and Aesop’s fables whose work balances narrative, language, humour, image and intimacy. Like them, I seek to archive not only objects but traces, a breath, a handprint, a syntax undone.
Where Adnan documents war through memory and light, I document the inner weather of a migrant soul through fragments of Greco-English hybrid language, oral repetition, and personal mythology. This interplay is part of what I call documenting the unsayable.
Language Ply: Playing With Tongues
In one of my central language experiments, I explored language plying – the act of twisting, weaving, layering tongues to create a new texture of meaning. GrenGLISH, as I called it, is not just a bilingual tool but an identity act: a third space where neither Greek nor English dominates, but both survive and transform.
“She didn’t save me. / She saw me—saw through me!”
(*from “Aeolus and Nausicaä”)
This creative-linguistic hybridisation is an important part of how I document my cultural perspective and poetic thinking.
A Personal Odyssey in Practice
I now see my work as a form of odyssey-documentation. In the poem “Aeolus and Nausicaä”, I trace a journey not through seas but through mythic encounters that allow self-reclamation. Aeolus does not carry a god’s breath but a bag of questions. Nausicaä does not save me; she witnesses me.
In “The Rear Sea (She) Shell”, the feminine voice echoes like seafoam: distant but close to the skin. These works are as much about how I gather fragments as they are about the final narrative. My documentation includes drafts with handwritten notes, water-stained paper, photos of performance readings by the sea, each piece part of the archive.
Final Poetic Statement: “Marble (Marvel)”
I do not chase the chisel.
I wait for it to come to me.
A stillness thick with longing.
Cool marble beneath the sun.
A white slab of silent yes.
Not unfinished, but unbroken.
Let the world come.
Let the storm strike hard.
Let her hands form mine.
I’ll transform myself
Whatever the moment
Dares to shape in me.
With this poem, I understand that documentation is not only about preservation but about potential. It is not merely archiving the past but making space for transformation.
This body of work—its poems, its images, its sketches, its silences, forms not a portfolio, but a living record. A breath. A bag of winds. A story still travelling home.
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