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At the end of the 19th century, families from Kassos departed the island, relocating to Suez and Port Said. The construction of the Canal attracted populations into a zone of significant technological development and cultural coexistence. The Kassiots who settled there integrated into a polyglot community, bringing with them customs, sartorial habits and oral traditions. In Sofia Zarari's work, Connecting Flight (2025), we witness the reactivation of a latent psychological reservoir that exceeds personal recollection and traverses the spectrum of inherited experience. A central photograph from the late 19th century, depicting members of the artist’s maternal lineage, operates as a carrier of genealogical density and a conduit for unconscious intensities. The materiality of the image ceases to remain static, instead becoming a translucent surface that composes a nexus of desires, diasporic pressures, and ritualistic acts of evocation. The delicate voile fabric on which the image unfolds behaves as a sponge, absorbing the traces of an entire lifetime. The final piece emerged from the stitching of the photograph and its printing onto painted and embroidered linen inherited from the artist’s paternal family, unifies the two lines of her past. The technique of collage is employed as an intimate necessity to revisit a fragmented past, to reattach an unspoken trauma sedimented within the mnemonic matter of familial reference. By reinstating this genealogical bond, Zarari proposes a mechanism of intrapsychic excavation. Through the reassembly of the image, there arises a subtle deciphering of the maternal and the ingrained cultural imprint to encounter and converse with the present. The figures in the photograph remain rooted, like a touch transmitted across generations that never met. Zarari surrenders to a kind of silent assemblage, where the whisper of a particular time is no longer separable from the materials. Far from being a mere backdrop, Connecting Flight becomes an internal territory of remembrance, a domain where the past cannot return, yet continues to exist within the present.

Dr. Kostas Prapoglou
Archaeologist-Architect, Contemporary Art Critic, Curator