Portable Aesthetics and Intimacy in Motion
This article shares highlights from my presentation at the 2025 Conference of the Hellenic Society for Aesthetics, themed “Dwelling in Dressing: Contemporary Aesthetics of the Familiar.” My talk explored the emotional and aesthetic dimensions of the suitcase — not as a mere object, but as a vessel of identity, memory, and care.
The work you see here is part of a larger project-in-progress, combining storytelling, visual thinking, and rituals of transition.
A Glimpse Into the Research
“A suitcase is never just a container. It is a curated world in motion.”
What do we carry when we move from one place to another — emotionally, materially, symbolically?
Through personal narratives and collage postcards, this project investigates how aesthetic choices reflect deeper human needs for safety, belonging, and continuity.
Drawing on thinkers like Yuriko Saito, Gaston Bachelard, and Grant McCracken, I examine the suitcase not only as a functional object, but as a field of aesthetic intelligence — revealing the ethics, memories, and identities we hold dear.
“Aesthetic experience does not only reside in beauty, but in the way something becomes meaningful — through rituals, associations, and attentiveness.”
Each suitcase becomes a capsule of our familiar world: a thread connecting origin and destination.
Four Portable Fragmen
During the talk, I presented four collage-style postcards — each one reflecting a different emotional layer of travel and transition:
📍 The Professional in Transit
A suitcase filled with order and uncertainty — capturing the identity shifts we experience in professional moves, especially when we relocate not just physically but socially and emotionally.
📍 The T-Shirt with Flowers
An everyday item charged with meaning — a token of summer, of softness, of someone we miss. The t-shirt becomes a container of longing, of return, of comfort through repetition.
📍 Burnt Hopes (featured in the exhibition “Invisible Hopes,” Alma Mater Gallery)
Inspired by real stories of disappearance and silence, this collage captures the traces of what was once expected — and what was lost. It speaks of resilience, of trauma, of memory as resistance.
📍 The Self We Wear
How do we pack ourselves? This collage explores the tension between appearance and inner sense, between identity we perform and the quiet truth we carry inside. What parts of us are visible when we travel?
Each piece is a map — not just of where we go, but of who we become on the way.
What’s Next: A Living Project
This presentation is only a glimpse into a broader research-based project currently in development. The next steps involve participatory elements, a growing archive of postcards, and experiential formats connecting people, places, and belongings.
If this touched something in you — a memory, a ritual, a gesture — stay connected.
This isn’t the end of the journey. It’s an open invitation.
🧳 The suitcase is not only packed with items — it’s packed with meaning.
What would yours contain?
