Ghost Relief I (The Mansion of The Kontou Family), 2015
Ghost Relief II (The House on Smolensky Street), 2015
Ghost Relief III (The Red House), 2015
Ghost Relief IV (Villa Kazouli), 2015
Ghost Relief V (The House on Vasilissis Olgas Avenue), 2015
Wax, pigment, wick, wood
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Donated by Dakis Joannou, 2025
Malvina Panagiotidi’s series Ghost Reliefs I–V draws on tales of Greece’s “haunted houses”—buildings with sinister pasts that have often served as sites of torment and death, and are thus inscribed in urban myths and the collective imaginary as places surrendered to the supernatural. The works in the series explore how urban space is shaped by constantly shifting stories, rumours, and collective fantasies: folk narratives, superstitions, and oral memories present these buildings as carriers of a protean memory, where the historical and the imaginary coexist. Panagiotidi casts the buildings’ façades as fragile wax sculptures, temporary portraits of architectural forms hovering between presence and absence. Like the ghosts of the stories that surround them, the works transform the urban fabric into a spectral archive: a palimpsest where the topographies of memory overlap, a field of multiple temporalities and shifting narratives. At the same time, they constitute a more tangible commentary on the history of habitation in Greek urban space. More specifically, the works critique the obliteration of the modern Greek city’s character as shaped in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the pervasive postwar practice of antiparochi (whereby landowners granted contractors their plots in exchange for apartments) and its sweepingly homogenising effect.
In this intersection of architecture and storytelling, Panagiotidi explores how oral history shapes the experience of the city. Stories of haunted houses do not function merely as popular horror tales; they constitute a mechanism through which communities process events, losses, or traumas that are often absent from official historiography. Buildings are thus transformed into focal points where different temporalities converge. Their architectural form belongs to the city’s present, while the stories surrounding them place them in an equivocal realm somewhere between history and the imagination. By isolating the façade, Panagiotidi detaches the building from its functional context and treats it as a surface for projecting collective narratives. Wax, a fragile and transient material, reinforces the spectral quality of the works. Each relief features a wick and burns gradually over the course of the exhibition, transforming the sculpture itself into a temporal process of decay and disappearance. In this way, the Ghost Reliefs propose an alternative reading of urban memory: as a living process of transformation in which historical events, urban myths, and narratives constantly interact and are rearticulated.
Malvina Panagiotidi was born in Athens in 1985. She lives and works in Athens.
