The Epistolographers

The Epistolographers

In The Epistolographers, Klitsa Antoniou creates a space where confinement converges with imagination and memory intertwines with materiality. Twenty-four alabaster tiles rise from the floor like spectral remnants of a submerged landscape. Each tile bears the reverse-embossed trace of letters written in spaces of incarceration -- drawn from figures like Mandela, Gramsci, Wilde, Dostoevsky, and Saadawi -- where personal and political narratives meet with poignant urgency. Antoniou transposes the carceral heterotopia into the gallery, crafting a space where absence becomes tangible and language, chiseled into stone, resists obliteration.
The dense, matte alabaster contrasts the ephemeral nature of the letters. Far from transparent, its surface holds a somatic weight, evoking the slow sedimentation of suffering and endurance. The act of transmission is delayed, requiring the visitor’s touch, movement, and engagement to animate the traces. Confronted with fragmented inscriptions, the visitor must decode the texts, mirroring the act of recovering repressed histories and silenced voices.
Antoniou reveals imprisonment not only as spatial constraint but as a field where alternative imaginaries persist. The work resonates with Judith Butler’s ideas on censorship, where language is neither fully suppressed nor fully free. In The Epistolographers, language flickers in the unstable space between absence and presence, demanding engagement with histories of oppression, endurance, and resilience.