Artworks > "Broken Souls" @The Aegean Center for the Fine Arts, Paros, Greece

Broken Souls
September 2018

"Broken Souls" is a site specific installation made with wooden pieces of broken traditional fishing boats that I collected at the points bulldozers break them in the shipyards of Paros Island, Greece.

Since 1996 the EU subsidies the breaking of traditional fishing boats with the excuse of overfishing. Thousands of traditional skounas, peramata, trehantiria, kaikia, brikia, golettes, varkalades, tsernikia, (types of traditional boats) have been destroyed since then. Along with those, small shipyards (tarsanades) and people working on the making of these unique boats for centuries are dramatically vanishing as well.

A very long and strong tradition is disappearing, without really resolving overfishing issues over the years. On the contrary.

Broken Souls is dedicated to these broken boats and the generations whose lives were devoded strangling in the seas fishing, trading, building and maintaining them. Each piece of wood carries a personal and a nations' history.

Sound at the end is from documentary Aigaio Nyn and Aei directed by Giorgos Kolozis and presented by Kostas Gouzelis. Voice belongs to the shipwright Komianos Tampakouris @Tarsanas (Shipyard) of Mavrikou brothers, Syros Island, Greece, while a bulldozer is breaking a relatively new (12-years-old) wooden fishing boat. Translation from Greek: "Broken or not broken, these pieces (of wood) are irreplaceable". Sound recording: Dimitris Markou, 2003.