Inner State
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
A.Gramsci
In this stagnant space, in this gap between eras, landscapes look bizarre, cut off the real world, pending for their unknown fate, as a visualization of the inner state of their inhabitants. The horizon is hidden, preventing us to see what’s yet to come.
Empty highways, solar panel fields, constructions left unfinished, rotten watermelons and torn flags seem stuck in an intermediate state, portraying the current situation, like distorted symbols of a bygone era of growth.
In this serene rural scenery, far away from the city’s battlefield, there is a subtle feeling of uncannyness. The depicted structures stand as a kind of neo-ruins, all of them have a part of the story to tell, but we have to look closer to discover it.
Found in this situation of not being able to look forward while the past seems already distant and out of reach, disorientation is what one feels. Relying on expectations is not a choice, neither memories can provide a shelter.
There is nothing certain except the situation itself.
The Desire for Consciousness
These images have no titles and no captions to guide you about what to see or how to perceive their content. There is no text to recreate the missing context.
In these images it’s impossible to determine the time, the place or the circumstances under which the photo was taken as the black background deprives us from any other information that would help us locate its subject in the real world.
In this way, relocated in a virtual space, the depicted object somehow loses its “realness” and tends to represent the meaning of it, it becomes an idea and it is transformed into a symbol.
Although the operation and the meaning of a symbol are predetermined in this series I create new symbols and invite the viewer to give them meaning by reading them literally or metaphorically. In my mind these images work in coherence, like a deck of cards that tells a different story every time it’s shuffled, raising questions about how differently each one of us interprets the same stimulus and therefore how diverse interpretations can occur when meanings are not fixed but depending on the ever changing context and every individual viewer.
Maria Mavropoulou was born in 1989 and she lives and works in Athens, Greece. She completed her MFA studies in 2018, at Athens School of Fine Arts, from where she got her BA in 2014. She has studied painting and sculpture, although her main medium is photography while her work expands to new forms and uses of the photographic image, such as VR. The resulting images are at the boundary line between plausibility or not, potentiality and non-potentiality, random and constructed.
Playing with the perception of viewers she aspires to question the role and power of photography in an era that is dominated by it.
Her work has been presented in numerous exhibitions in Greece and abroad and publicized in multiple magazines.
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