About

 

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα.
Tell me, Muse.

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"Tell me, Muse..." Thus begins The Odyssey. Before the story itself unfolds, Homer invokes a voice that does not invent the narrative but carries its memory. Daughters of Mnemosyne, the Muses are the guardians of transmitted knowledge; the poet merely lends them his voice.

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Ὀδύσσεια reimagines this invocation by replacing the Muse with the figure of the female mourner. Across Mediterranean traditions, she accompanies the dead, preserves their memory, and gives collective form to loss. Her knowledge no longer comes from divine inspiration but from lived experience. Like the Muse, she does not tell her own story; she lends her voice to a memory that extends beyond herself.

This body of work begins with a simple question:

What does it mean to inhabit a world after one of its possibilities has disappeared?

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Death does not simply take someone away. It transforms the world of those who remain. The loss is not only emotional; it alters the very conditions through which life is experienced. Familiar places, gestures and encounters continue to exist, yet they no longer belong to the same reality. Grief is not only the experience of absence. It is the experience of inhabiting a world that has become irreversibly different.

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Like Odysseus, who never returns to the same world he left because his journey has transformed him, those who experience loss cannot return to the world that existed before it. The odyssey is therefore no longer the return of a hero to his homeland. It becomes the journey of those who continue to live after the irreversible, learning to inhabit a reality whose meaning has been fundamentally altered.

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Each sculpture stands as an autonomous episode within that journey. Like the songs of The Odyssey, every work reveals only a fragment of a larger narrative whose beginning and end remain beyond our reach. Together they form an odyssey without a hero, where the female mourner guides us from one work to the next—not to recount death itself, but to bear witness to the world that follows it.

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The project is part of Bake Your Pain, an ongoing body of work I began three years ago following the death of my father. Through bread masks sculpted from my own face each time I cry, the project seeks to give form to grief—not as an image of loss, but as a physical language carried by the body.

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