There is no need to understand these pictures, you can rather feel them. They were edited and sequenced via the soul of an imaginary island and the aftermath of a trauma.
So imagine, a central core, something like a visual mantra, a ritual, guiding the need for these pictures. A black celebration.
Past, future and presence exist equally here, in these photos. Birth, death, good, evil and a black sky above, watching us.
No fear interrupts the eye, no ghosts exist in this story. Life is a mirror or a movie, it is what we forgive and what we forget, what we love and what takes the pain away, a glimpse to the unknown, a dive into a black lake.
I had to experience the return to my life after a rather physical and psychological trauma but when I came back it was all new
and different and strange and beautiful.
I call this ‘’A Thousand Days of Return’’, because the project begun when I was already three years sober.
Life is not waiting where you left it. It has moved on, grown unfamiliar, learned to live without you. The body becomes a landscape altered by force— rerouted signals, new thresholds of pain, silences where instinct once lived.
Return begins with mistrust. You test the ground. You negotiate with movement. You celebrate what once required no permission.
A thousand days is the time it takes to stop comparing before and after—and start naming now.
Healing does not restore. It translates. It teaches the body another language for the same desires. Some mornings feel borrowed. Others feel earned. Most exist in between, where function replaces freedom. The trauma remains, not as a wound but as a calibration— a new measure of effort, a new definition of strength.
A Thousand Days of Return created between 2022-2025, a long part of it created at Ithaka island as part of a residency program and a part of images were created with AI.
Kostis Argyriadis