Eugenia Vereli | Gestures of Preservation

“Gestures of Preservation” explores the imagery, forms, materials, and gestures associated with ritual objects, amulets, votive offerings, religious texts, and practices of remembrance. Drawing from material traditions encountered in everyday life in Greece – such as Lazarus breads (lazarakia), roadside shrines, ossuaries, and the preservation of relics – the project examines forms of care through which what has perished is not erased but held, touched, and transformed.

Working through ceramics, cast metal, preserved organic matter, and repeated gestures, Vereli approaches sculpture as a site where material transformation becomes a way of investigating what remains. Rather than treating care as symbolic, she understands it as a material process of continuation – suspended between mourning and making, letting go and holding on.

The project develops through a parallel process of situated research and studio work across Athens, including visits to devotional and funerary sites, archives, and museum collections. Through this process, the Vereli intends to create sculptural objects sustained through acts of dedication and offering, where value shifts from function to relation and materials register transformation rather than stability.