In the old Greek myths, disobedience was a commonality for making the Gods angry which is still the case when mankind doesn’t follow the command of the ones in power. In a Greek myth, Deucalion had to create a new mankind after the old one was destroyed by Zeus. Each stone that Deucalion threw became a man, and each stone Pyrrha, his wife, threw became a woman. This is how the new human kind was created. Coming from an old quarry suburb named The City of the Stone in the northwestern part of Athens, I used the location of the inactive now quarry which has been turned into a theatre made of stone to create the portraits of the local inhabitants. The idea behind the series is strongly inspired by the myth: Mortal against God, Man against Capitalism, the pattern resembles.
This series pushes the reflection on the object as sign located within a contemporary notion of allegory where meaning and signs are accumulated. In a society where man is trapped and suffocating, without any alternative option for moving forward, cataclysm is the reality, but the possibility of the new mankind is utopic. The series carries the title The Asphodel Meadows which was a place in the Greek Underworld where ordinary or indifferent souls who did not belong anywhere else were sent. With Greece being the underdog of Europe for the last few years and its people struggling daily for contradicting a life imposed to them, this series aims at using symbolism for illustrating this ongoing state of mind.
