Portsmouth Open: Eva Voutsaki

“It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember”, Bessel Van Der Kolk.

Vis Absoluta: Family Constellations is an ongoing project about my Cretan grandad who was a forced labor in Maouthaousen concentration camp during World War 2.

I have used photographs from our family album as well as photos from the concentration camp (such as Maouthaousen commandant Franz Zeires’s portrait) in an attempt to try and understand the fragmented memory my grandad had. He suffered from PTSD and chronic alcoholism and even though he survived and came back to Crete he seemed trapped in trauma. His mental health relapses and deep sorrow seem to have been looping in our family in the form of intergenerational trauma. We have all inherited his pain, his complex PTSD, but also his desire to survive and enjoy simple happy family moments.

*Definition of family constellations:
a) A therapeutic approach designed to help reveal the hidden dynamics in a family or relationship in order to address any reasons impacting these relationships and heal them.
b) A group of stars that forms an imaginary outline or pattern on the celestial sphere, typically representing an animal, mythological person or creature, or an inanimate object. The origins of the earliest constellations likely go back to prehistory.