As promised, this is the second half of the Demi Encounter entitled, Fairies Dance. I present to you my first ever "music video", which I have filmed for my composition Fairies Dance. This video is a collaboration with my sister, who is a structural engineer, architect, and visual artist, and whose art forms are featured in the video. The purpose of Encounters is to share our creative voices and our stories and so I have included my story behind the Fairies Dance music video below. Enjoy! (P.S. If you would like to skip the intro, the official Encounter begins at 04:45)

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Home where my thought's escaping, Home where my music's playing, Home where my love lies waiting, Silently for me - Homeward Bound, Simon & Garfunkel.

For the past 28 years, home has always been the same for me. Literally. I never moved from my childhood home. The big move for me was down the hall from my childhood apartment and into my mom's art studio during those "liberating" years of college. Then I moved to Italy this past year for 6 months and home became a concept for me to rediscover. With a Greek father, Europe has been a constant in my life and I feel like I have a second home in Greece as well as Amsterdam (where my sister had lived). The difference with Italy was that I knew no one, let alone have any family there. This was truly a foreign place for me where I would have to figure out how to live, survive, and thrive on my own.

Fairies Dance, the video, turned out to by my personal exploration of finding home in Italy.

I have an older sister who is a structural engineer and architect by profession and who has an incredible eye for the visual arts and aesthetic design. She creates little forms when she has an idea (which is often) and so, throughout my apartment, you will find these forms sprinkled around, seeking refuge in the nooks and crannies of my bookshelves. I wanted to share these forms with the Encounters community as just a glimpse into the creative visions of my sister therefore, I decided to make a film to my song, Fairies Dance, with her forms as the focal point.

It was through my journey with my sister's forms that I came to realize how I found home in Italy. Walking around the small Italian town where I lived, Piacenza, I began to see my sister's forms in the architecture of the old Italian town. This sparked a realization that there are constants in life no matter where we are. Visually, these constants were my sister's forms as I uncovered them in the architecture of sleepy Piacenza and the cityscape of my hometown. From my experience in Italy, these constants were love, a "family" meal, and camaraderie.

And so, what began as a desire to artistically collaborate with my sister, became a deeper exploration for me of the journey to find home. Although our path in life is unpredictable, we leave behind a thread of footsteps wherever we go that tells our story, and as we venture into the unknown, those constants await us, masked in a different form but ready to be rediscovered.