Photopolis Agrinio Photo Festival presents the work of the photography group “art8”  “Encounters”, curated by Fotini Papachatzi.

“The “Encounters” photo collection is compiled through a spectrum of ideas developed from the participants’ complosite intersections between Italo Calvino’s short story “The Adventure of a Photographer”, Thanasis Valaora’s “Garbage Archive” and the photographers’ personal research in their private space or in the urban landscape that surrounds them.

As a starting point, these elements co-exist as multiple cultural references, either as new records of constant mobility, such as that of Anna Asimakoula or the “dark” black and white and the colorful images of Dimitris Grigoriou, or as records of the anthropogeography of the edge of the city by Alexa Dimitrianou and Kostas Tsolkas . Eleni Litina’s images seem to float sideways like some kind of movie curtain, an aimless negotiation of participation between public and private in an age of constant surveillance and self-projection. Dimitris Kourtis, like another “hunter of the elusive, like thousands of people who take instant photos” moves between the blurred corridors and the fixed geometry of the urban landscape, while Theoni Livaditi searches for the trace in the vast African landscape. From the trash archive, Panos Kaltsas chooses to utilize as evidence of social gender those photos with which the central photograph of his composition interacts. It is this treatment that creates a sense of vigilance and uneasiness: public vs. private space, identity and gender, private and family life, the naked body versus collective identity. Aris Papavassiliou’s nocturnal, almost cinematic wandering through empty public spaces is imbued with the same unsettling feeling as public space comes under increasing pressure in today’s world of global acceleration and urbanization. In Lampos Balta’s macro-landscapes, the viewer is confronted with familiar and unfamiliar textures that transform into imaginary beings, mountains or dreamlike paths”.

Fotini Papahatzi