On October 29th 1990, Teti Papacharitos returned to Greece from Great Britain where she was studying History of Art and announced to her mother Olga Charitos Papacharitos and her two aunts, Maria and Eirini, that she is quitting her studies because Western Art is dead. Despite her mother's hysterical efforts to persuade her otherwise, Teti never returned to London . She stayed in Athens, rented an apartment with her friend Evi on Lycabettus Hill and started making jewellery while working at Passepartout bar.
(Oi Treis Harites / Τhe Three Graces, “Mother Courage”, Episode 29, first aired: October 29, 1990, Mega Channel)

Since its first air date, I have watched the above episode many times over on YouTube. Apart from the hysterically funny one-liners of the main cast about Teti's moral obligation to revive Western Art or about her quest to "find herself" by buying a motorcycle instead of a fridge with her mother's money, I have always observed the motifs on their eccentric sweaters, their surprisingly sleek, modern living room -looking more like a stage than a tv set-, the Tsarouchis and Moralis paintings on their walls.

It is an idealized version of the houses we lived in, in the beginning of the 90s and maybe a version of the homes we would have liked to live in now. A stand-alone house, probably built during the 1930s somewhere in Chalandri, recently refurbished with modern and classical elements (esp. Eirini's -the spinster's- bedroom). It's our uncles' and aunts' home, not in reality, but in the way it is remembered twenty years later, after the white Varangis couches have been replaced with more current, more comfortable IKEA ones, the wooden window frames have become aluminium and the High Definition Plasma Screen has succeeded the black TV console and the video tapes, gift from “Cinema” magazine and all. We still wear some of their clothes or try to find them in our mothers' attics, and surely we can recognize the shapes, motifs, color combinations wherever we may detect them in our current habitat, either as authentic remains of that period or as their representations.

Despite the endless times I have visited the Charitos sisters' home, it is impossible to remember what it was, that first time, that I saw it before the reruns begun. I attempt to describe it by abstracting and distorting many of its elements, to turn into it a model of my remembrance rather than an exact depiction of a set.

Antonakis