Your home will be where you put your head to sleep, for a pillow you'll have a dream-grove.
Refuge Dreamgrove (2004-2016)
I recall from my childhood, these words said by a prostitute, who took in a scared twelve year old child. He was one of thousands of Greek survivors of what is called the "Asia Minor Catastrophe". To reach Lebanon, he walked barefoot for days from Smyrna in Turkey. He lost the rest of his family on the road and sought and found refuge for four nights in a brothel in the port area of Beirut. For the rest of his life, this sentence and that city were his haven. Though I never met him in person, that child was my grandfather Dimitris Constantinidis.
Refuge Dreamgrove is a body of work based on the notion of hospitality.
Around 2009 I noticed the recurrence of men sleeping in public places in my images, on subways, trains, boats…
I structured these photographs, partially inspired by my grandfather's migration and refuge, around travels through the cities and mainly countries that border the Mediterranean, travels that, for many reasons, including escape from Lebanon’s Civil War, have constituted much of my life. I always travel to meet people, never to visit a place.
Men asleep, internal spaces & external views from where I was welcomed, are elements of the work. The juxtaposition of these elements make up the journey. The pictures bring out a heavy tiredness, a sense of exhaustion that goes with the wandering, and also a dreaming. While they are out in the open, in public, each of the wanderers is locked into a very personal and silent world, a kind of grove. As they seek refuge, look for safety, lie down and rest they are passed over and ignored. And then they move on, and on, in an endless migration, or in an odyssey towards something that they could call home…
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