Athens Photo Festival

The work “Apres Vous” is a collective work on collective memory. It serves as a comment on the personal and family photographs that end up in the trash, in antique shops and many times in unrelated hands. Orphaned images, adopted photographs, far from their surroundings, their references, their historical background.

Is it that the photographs are lost or is it their stories that are lost? This exchange of hands is for the image, the continuation of its history, multiplied by the imagination of its new owner and the social circle in which he exposes it. Without us knowing the criteria, but certainly with the support of luck, some photographs get saved, they are given the opportunity for a second (who knows maybe multiple) life. A different place – usage awaits for the image.

In the work “Apres Vous” some of the images that landed in our hands (in the above-mentioned way), became, within our close social circle, the subject of discussions, laughs, reflections and eventually they found a place in the pantheon of our beloved things. Being aware of our debt to them, we take them out of oblivion, not exposing them as findings or aesthetic objects, but as protagonists in the great celebration of their “rebirth”. The place is suitable. The circumstance is appropriate: we are all people who consume pictures. But these will not be tasted or consumed, no matter how desired they have become. The snapshot of the celebration should last … and be consumed as a work.