Eleana Antonaki

Uncanny Gardening is a project that consists of drawings on wood panels that present a collection of fictional objects. It is named after one of the drawings in the series that depicts the fictional book Uncanny Gardening, A Complete Guide For Planting Yucca Trees, Persian Silk Trees and Bougainvilleas. The other objects that I chose to include in this project are connected with and indexical of specific historical and political moments in Greece, such as the civil war, the years of the dictatorship and the political events after the bankruptcy. The departure point for this work was my family’s long tradition of planting a Persian Silk Tree every time they relocated to a new place, throughout a series of domestic relocations within Turkey and from Turkey to Greece. My family’s gardening tradition functions as an indexical marker of the historical events that formed my country’s history and my family’s sense of identity. I decided to appropriate the way that my family’s planting operates within the historical context, as a strategy to create the work. Each drawing is a representation of an object that exists as a symptom of a historical condition and bears the complexity of the interweaving layers of the history of an ongoing antagonism between the conservative and the leftist forces of the country.The objects in the drawings do not exist within a real archive nor in a fictional documentation authored by me. They only exist through the representation of their images. The images provide enough information to talk about the nature of the symptom of the historical moments they stand for but not the objects they are related to. They are constructed in a way that they function as narrations and comments on different historical moments and their different conditions. http://eleanaantonaki.com/