Loan, 15 minutes 35 seconds, 2006, DV/PAL
My Greek journey began with research: information on companies that went bankrupt in the late Eighties and Nineties; ghost factories, depressed areas, abandoned villages and places of no possible interest to tourists.
I was looking for the sites and the sights that would give me free rein to redefine the concepts of development and of disaster, and to define a personal mapping of regions that contradict the unreal image projected by the media, folklore documentaries, tourist guides and advertising.
Within the context of the work, the urban environment was the real world; leaving it behind, I was entering a zone of uncertainty and obscurity.
In this ‘other’ world, which often verged on the bizarre, the depressed, the scary, the impoverished, the futile and the forgotten served as catalysts to reveal a virtually unexpected, transcendental dimension to their reality.
I often felt that the places themselves were summoning me; little coincidences, conversations with inhabitants in every area, my constant research that led me naturally and almost self-evidently from one place to another during the journey.
I formed an immediate link with these places in an almost psychometric way. I would sink into their silence and assimilate the alien and the unknown from the little things I found there, attempting to unlock secrets, to see beyond the visible, to reinvent their histories.
The enormous IZOLA plant that exuded such a powerful sense of teeming with the ghosts of an invisible union; Mantoudi, an entire industrial village abandoned with locked rooms and packed up files; the huge, ruined flower greenhouse at Aktio which now houses an ecosystem all of its own; the imposing Radion hotel in Kammena Vourla; the Pomak villages that seem to belong to another era in Greek history; the Pineio dam; the area around Ptolemaida; the fields deliberately torched on the Evros border, and a host of other sites revivified memories.
2006, The Grand Promenade, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens.
2007, 53th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany.
2007, Loan, Zlatno Oko gallery, Balkan Art 2007, Novi Sad, Serbia.
2007, Istanbul international architecture and urban films festival, Goethe institut, Istanbul.
2009, Midsummer night’ s dream, Open air screening room, RemapKM, Athens.
2010, kunsthalle athina, curators Marina Fokidis, Sotirios Bahtstezis , Athens.
2010, The way the Morning Broke was Quite Unusual, Annie Wharton Gallery, Los Angeles.
2010, Precious, Curator Annie Wharton, Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, Miami.
(selections of the photographic archive of the project)
