Home No. 1, a large black and white drawing, which begins with the precision of an architectural floor plan. A large portion of the drawing is occupied by a blueprint: measured lines, technical plans, the promise of structure and certainty. Is it a house? Whose is it? A distant memory, or someone's carefully imagined future home?
Yet that certainty slowly slips away. Pencil and graphite interrupt the clarity of the plan, dissolving architecture into something unstable, where recollection proves less reliable than construction. At the centre sits a rocking horse, a quiet reminder of the fact that our first idea of home is formed long before we understand architecture.
Memory deceives and protects in equal measure. It can be blurry and yet intensely vivid. I lived in several houses as a child, but one of them remains printed in my memory much like the blueprint in this drawing. We moved out when I was just six years old, yet even now, if I close my eyes, I can still imagine walking through it: every room, every corner, certain qualities of light, even certain smells. Somehow, that house still gives me comfort. It is where a particular childhood tranquility seems to reside. Perhaps it was left there, much like the ghost of a rocking horse in Taoukidou's drawing: a memory, a feeling, a state of being, so fleeting and ephemeral.
Childhood leaves its own floor plan, one that survives even after buildings disappear, cities change and people move on. Rather than documenting a particular place, Home No. 1 asks a more unsettling question: is home somewhere we can return to, or simply the version our memory has chosen to preserve?
Alexandra Taoukidou (b. 1999, Thessaloniki) is a Greek artist who currently lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. Alexandra Taoukidou works primarily through drawing, using graphite as both a precise drafting tool and a material capable of dissolving certainty. A graduate of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the OSTEN Biennale in North Macedonia and INT'L PAPERWORKS at Minot State University, alongside residencies in France and Mexico.
Text by Maria Myasnikova