Tama (τάμα), plural Tamata (τάματα) is Greek for a special kind of votive offerings you will find in orthodox churches all over Greece. Tamata are small metal plates (aluminium, nickel, brass, silver, gold) with embossed figurations of the desired.
They cover a wide range of motives - material objects like a car, a house, a book and a ship; a variety of humans and animals of different species and ages, as well as body parts, organs or limbs. Each of them in turn offers a wide range of interpretations: a heart can indicate a cardiac problem as well as an unfulfilled love.
Tamata are bought in special shops, or (more and more rarely), self made at home. They then are brought to a church or chapel and placed underneath or next to the icon of the saint who is responsible for this type of wish, or just of the favourite saint.
They can be brought beforehand (to plea) or after the fulfillment of the vow (to thank), therby building a special material realization of an ex-voto, which comprise also paintings, wax or metal figures, or personal precious objects like jewelery. They are special threshold-objects: a way to communicate between humans and gods a way of embodying the not yet realized wish a way of giving a material-symbolic form to an inner longing. During my stays in Athens and Amorgos, I visited dozens of churches, chapels and shops in search for tamata. Some of them I traced with graphite on small note papers brought from the central library in Zurich. These picutres, made them translucent with local olive oil, then get cyanotyped under the afternoon sunlight in Amorgos. Through this process, I am sensing a way of taking the tamata with me without physically removing them. I try to transform a haptic impression into a visual one. And I try to open up a space for day-dreaming into the blue – for sensing our own deep wishes and longings, within and beyond the symbolic.
