Leaving the Self: Nomadic passages in the memoir of a woman artist

In this paper I follow nomadic passages in the memoir of Sofia Laskaridou, a Greek woman artist. I am interested into how her dislocation from familiar places and spaces in the beginning of the twentieth century opened up unforeseen territories for her self to be constituted as a travel logbook, a chart tracing paths of becoming. As a writer and painter of her own modernity, Laskaridou reconstitutes herself in retracing her paths in the cities she lived as a young art student. However in writing herself in space, she also rewrites the city, offering insights in the experience of the spaces of modernity from a range of marginalised subject positions, in terms of gender and geography. In observing modern life within the discourse of the aesthetic and the limitations of her own time, class, culture and geographies, Laskaridou’s memoir becomes a site of contestation and her autobiographical map rather chaotic. What I argue is that as she moves on, she leaves herself behind, continuously becoming-other as she creates real-and-imaginary connections with the spaces she temporarily inhabits. In this light, nomadism becomes an effective conceptual tool for making cartographies of gendered spatial practices in becoming a woman and an artist