UNREAL ESTATE
2019
Unreal Estate is a work consisting of a postcard stand and 6 postcards depicting screenshots grabbed from two Hollywood productions portraying locations in Greece. In The Two Faces of January, Chania - my hometown - becomes the backdrop for a contemporary production of a ‘60s thriller, where local residents (myself included) were conscripted as extras. For Jason Bourne, an action movie, the neighborhood of Exarcheia - a historical site of political struggle and police brutality and my birthplace - is reconstructed in Tenerife to stage a ten-minute long fictional riot sequence.
By tracking and isolating gradual layers of personhood across the frames selected – my body as an extra (initially having failed the cast for ‘not looking local enough’), a pet, a friend’s doorway, a rooftop, a fictional surveillance map and a CCTV monitor- the work operates as a tactical counter-economy. Reclaiming ownership of those personal yet copyrighted images, the work questions how spectacle renders place into a fungible simulacrum, where citizens are hired to decorate their own displacement and riots become the plot for an action movie. By turning a ubiquitous instrument of tourism and commodification into a sculptural prop, the work moves beyond the flattening of place into real estate, backdrop and spectacle, acting instead as a direct mechanism for reappropriation towards a shadow archive.
UNREAL ESTATE
2019
Unreal Estate is a work consisting of a postcard stand and 6 postcards depicting screenshots grabbed from two Hollywood productions portraying locations in Greece. In The Two Faces of January, Chania - my hometown - becomes the backdrop for a contemporary production of a ‘60s thriller, where local residents (myself included) were conscripted as extras. For Jason Bourne, an action movie, the neighborhood of Exarcheia - a historical site of political struggle and police brutality and my birthplace - is reconstructed in Tenerife to stage a ten-minute long fictional riot sequence.
By tracking and isolating gradual layers of personhood across the frames selected – my body as an extra (initially having failed the cast for ‘not looking local enough’), a pet, a friend’s doorway, a rooftop, a fictional surveillance map and a CCTV monitor- the work operates as a tactical counter-economy. Reclaiming ownership of those personal yet copyrighted images, the work questions how spectacle renders place into a fungible simulacrum, where citizens are hired to decorate their own displacement and riots become the plot for an action movie. By turning a ubiquitous instrument of tourism and commodification into a sculptural prop, the work moves beyond the flattening of place into real estate, backdrop and spectacle, acting instead as a direct mechanism for reappropriation towards a shadow archive.