Default Landscapes
Portfolio created: 2012
For three years now anger has been alternating with grief, shame with fear, while the horror of imminent disaster leaves us empty, staring into a void. For the past three years all conversations seem to have revolved around numbers and percentages, financial terms, acronyms in foreign languages, safe and unsafe liabilities, sustainable and unsustainable conditions, deals, accords, treaties, and so on.
Each and every one of us watches events unfold, silently, in front of the TV screen.
Yet, every day, even if for just a moment, something breaks through the harsh skin created by the fall and manages to penetrate deeper, bringing a little warmth to the day. It is something different for each of us: a friend’s concern, a pat on the back at work, solidarity and affection between partners. We long for intimacy in our private world; we take courage from our common destiny.
Way before we were told that Selective Default stands for financial bankruptcy, we were familiar with the term return to default settings. When something ceased to function, the only thing to do was to go back to basics, to return to what was essential.
The landscapes presented in the project are portraits of a country under constant stress, faced with both financial and moral collapse. At the same time, they represent a return to the basic qualities that make this country what it is. They are my day and night, the reality I experience and the dream I hope for.
These landscapes are the country I, too, helped to bring to its knees – and the country I too need to rebuild from the beginning.
This is my country. I intend to stay.
Athens Spread
Portfolio created: 2012
Athens Spread portfolio attempts to address the issue of the modern greek city in endless expansion, towards all directions with no regards to any natural or manmade limits; hiding also a wretched central area into a sea of swelling concrete structures. Nature as well as people end up deeply injured by this condition.
Dr. Kiki Kafkoula, professor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki has noted:
“As things stand the Greek cities do not nurture human communities neither do they foster historical traditions nor even nature. To survive they need to grow up and as if recovering from a child disease distance themselves from an auto-pilot process of private speculation that destabilizes them and undermines their creative perspective”.
The large scale photographic works created for the 2012 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture focus on the face of the capital, this ancient and at the same time very new Metropole, endeavoring to narrate its history and avoiding beautifying or covering its shortcomings. On the contrary, while keeping a proper distance they offer an accurate survey of the contemporary urban development and its outcome.
