Except the clouds

The project captures the oxymoronic nature of Athens, blending its mythological heritage with its political and economic struggles.

Athens is an oxymoron. Its flamboyant mythological heritage coexists with its dark and dramatic political and economic situation. Its sun shines brightly but crushes its streets. It is a blinding light that reveals its violence and its twilight faces. And yet one feels a much more intense life force than elsewhere. The idea of resistance takes on its full meaning. The bodies rise tirelessly to become one in the face of the chaos of history. In permanent revolution.

My project is to capture this oxymoron in images, but also the complexity of the contemporary in its different temporal strata - the past, present and future at the same time, as a set of vestiges that are constantly transforming. What is left when everything collapses?

Digital manipulations, reappropriation of archives and geometric composition mingle to form a unique, hybrid image, the sum of all these different temporalities and draw a fresco of the present time. As in the streets of the city, where the ancient and the contemporary rub shoulders and become entangled. To present the immensity of a moment_ extended and spread out in very distinct dimensions, time and space.

With this sentence of Walter Benjamin always in mind, like an invisible and obsessive thread, look for the light in the ruins of Attica. "In a landscape where nothing was recognizable except the clouds, and in the middle, in a field of forces crossed by tensions and destructive explosions, the tiny and fragile human body.

This text by Benjamin, which gave the title Except the Clouds, speaks of the impossibility for a generation to find in the experience of war a moral or political reference point for facing a world in ruins. What in principle appears to be a book of photographs, becomes by its very title a profound reflection on the experience of history and the way in which young Athenians in revolt take hold of history and face societies that can no longer think of the future by learning from their past.