This project takes us past the age of happy endings. It navigates, with open-ended innocence, a world of deepening humanitarian crisis, ruin landscapes, insecurity, cracked democracy and an everyday culture of mediated hopelessness. Our first objective is clarity, in the historical, political and social blur of the present. A collective storytelling experiment emerges, connecting significant instants and documenting untold stories in a mosaic of images and texts.
With clear eye in the blurry air we put this work forward, no longer looking forward to a future, to progress, to the idea of growth, but standing together in Commons, level-headed and broke, beyond the white noise of riot porn, shopping, new feudalism, speculator pundits, hashtag reportage, disaster media, analysis paralysis, photoshop urbanism and the constant crisis, straddling the red line of a divided Europe, building an ark of images and texts (a mosaic of lenses: an anti-screen: a sidewalk museum: a viewport to the shape of things to come), as the West slowly sinks into our very own Depression Era.
Greetings from Athens.
Petros Babasikas
January 2014
January 2014