Eleni Bagaki | Messing with Cavafy

Engaging with C. P. Cavafy’s diary and his first visit to Athens in 1901, Eleni Bagaki follows the poet’s footsteps through a city he found oppressively hot, humid, and blindingly bright. Through this retracing, both physical and literary, she aims to weave a narrative that connects our experiences across time, using the complaint as a mode of reflection on weather, place, and identity.

Rooted in a personal need to make sense of place and self, her practice uses autofiction to merge autobiography and fiction. By following in Cavafy’s footsteps through contemporary Athens, she intends to recreate his experiences, reimagining his narratives through the lens of her own subjectivity. She uses his reflections as a backdrop for a new story, one that speaks to her own relationship with the city and explores the complexities of identity and belonging today.

In addition, she investigates how weather shapes our experience of place—how environmental factors, such as temperature and light, affect not only our perception of the world around us but also our bodies and moods. Weather is an embodied experience, one that registers both physically and mentally. As she walks through Athens, sweating, the simple, daily question—“What should I wear today?”—will take on new meaning, highlighting not only the unpredictability of the weather but also the absurdity of dressing for a climate that no longer follows familiar patterns. This question becomes a lens through which to explore the intersection of personal narrative and global reality, revealing how intimate experiences are increasingly shaped by the broader context of climate change.

To broaden her research, she will engage with other poets and writers who have explored weather in personal ways, examining how their reflections shape narratives of place and identity. This will provide a richer literary context, allowing her to draw connections and contrasts with Cavafy’s work while deepening her exploration of the weather’s influence on emotional landscapes.

Through walking, photographing, and writing, she explores how her body and senses connect to the physical environment, creating space for contemplation, critique, and artistic expression. This dialogue between past and present—mediated by weather, body, and wandering—continues her exploration of place and identity, inviting reflection on navigating an ever-changing city while grappling with the transient nature of home and self.

My project began with Cavafy’s diary, “My First Trip in Greece (June 13 – August 5, 1901),” written during his first visit to Athens. I was struck by his discomfort with the city’s weather – the heat, the intense sunlight, the humidity – but also by the days when he recorded that he did not feel well enough to go out. These small admissions made the diary feel unexpectedly contemporary and very human. Travel is not presented as a continuous sequence of discoveries, but also as tiredness, inactivity, discomfort, and withdrawal. This felt especially relevant today, when travelling has become so accessible, idealized, and deeply embedded in mainstream culture.

Just before the residency began, I spent several days walking around Athens, tracing some of Cavafy’s movements through the city and visiting places he had mentioned. Athens is the city where I live, so I was not approaching it as a visitor encountering something new. Instead, I was trying to look again at a place already deeply familiar to me, mapping his experience of the city onto my own.

I used analogue photography to document these walks. Carrying a camera introduced a performative element into the process: walking, stopping, framing, looking, and taking a photograph became part of the work itself. The camera became less a tool for documenting the city and more a way of slowing down and paying attention to it.

At the same time, I began returning to my personal archive of images of male bodies found online: naked, beautiful, often fragmented, cropped, and without faces. I know nothing about the men depicted in these images, and there is usually no gaze looking back at me. I became interested in the freedom created by this one-directional act of looking. I can zoom in, crop, isolate a detail, alter the tones of the image, and decide what remains visible. Editing is fundamental to this process: through selecting and modifying, the image is gradually detached from its original context and reconstructed through my own gaze.

This parallel activity – looking at the city and looking at bodies – became central to the project’s development. I started wondering what Cavafy might have carried in his mind while walking through Athens: images, words, memories, bodies. This question led me toward his relationship with photography.