Stories in History: Folegandros, the minimum scale
This book consists of three basic elements: sayings, memories and narrations by the
people of Folegandros, official documents drawn from the Municipal Archive of the island
and photographs. In the book, the narrations of the Folegandriots are put down exactly
as spoken, using the peculiarities of the local idiom and the documents of the Archive
are transcribed with the same -usually erroneous- spelling and punctuation. Unfortunately,
that makes the book rather untranslatable and we regret that.
The stories, the documents and the pictures of the book, converge to what real life is
about on this small island of the Aegean. All over the world, stereotypes of tourist
formalization tend to yield picturesque images of people and civilizations. The idea is
to make tourists feel comfortable, enjoy the ambiguous exoticism of an illusion and leave
them content and ignorant. This book is anything but that. The stories -first hand testimonies
of living people- and the documents -hard evidence of the past- appeal to the reader: -Listen up!
The accompanying pictures make their own parallel statement: look closer!
The narrations of the Folegandriots were recorded and processed during 2003 - 2005 by Lara Kalliri.
The pictures have been taken during the same period by Despina Spyrou .
