“The work’s starting point has been my concern about the state of European politics – a concern that many share. For over a decade now, the continent has been shaken by intersecting crises.
Each such crisis reflects broader, transnational antagonisms, even if it is made manifest with particular intensity in a given country. Such antagonisms tend to be systemic, pointing to a fault line in European political life. Assuming the form of an ‘event’, a crisis can nonetheless indicate a longer-term destabilising process under way. The entire continent appears to be on the verge of turmoil.
The need to engage with these explosive conditions – even through the implicit, ‘abstract way’ of the visual – led me to a series of images that trace underlying signs of dislocation. Such signs tend to be excluded from a shared social view that might be seen to incubate a past, a present and, especially, a future. La insurrección es un… seeks to address what cannot be foreseen as the outcome of such social processes: the unpredictable, the tentative, the barely possible. To do so, I turned to metonymies as well as to signifiers that point to a certain open-endedness and that lend themselves to seeking new articulations but without implying their causes or identifying their goals.”
Dimitris Kechris is a photographer, curator and writer based in Athens. He graduated from the Department of Physics, University of Athens, and has attended photography courses at Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA). His work has been exhibited at the Benaki Museum, the Byzantine Museum, the Greek Film Archive, the Athens Municipality Arts Center, the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation, the History Museum at the University of Athens and Galeria Hexagono in Barcelona. He is the co-founder of ALDEBARAN – Contemporary Photography Hub while he is a curator for MedPhoto Festival (https://medphoto.gr/).
