Parallel Crisis

About

Empty Square is the production machine behind the project Parallel Crisis. The project has been exhibited in  major institutions (Rencontre d’Arles, Deste Foundation, Benaki Museum, PHotoEspana) and has received two international awards (Descubrimientos Award, PHotoEspaña 2015, Reviews Award, Athens Photo Festival 2016). During 2020 we will publish the book and organize an exhibition in Athens with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture.

Over the last six years a destructive financial crisis has struck Greece, dismantling an already wrecked social balance and driving the population into a state of collective depression. A condition of stagnation is ruling the capital city of Athens. The project Parallel Crisis is a creative document that addresses the ways in which the Medium of Photography is capable of describing this socio-economical event. An uneasy affinity develops between the property of photography to produce events of immobilized time and the negation of social time that widespread crisis instigates. What photography is really recording in Greece is a certain condition of numbness: subjects without the possibility of development, crippling unemployment, confined migrants, neighborhoods reigned by silence and fear. In these conditions, the Medium suspends time that has already been stalled. Photography itself is conceived as a metaphor, a mirror of the financial crisis.