UNREAL ESTATE
Unreal Estate is a work consisting of a postcard stand and postcards / flyers depicting screenshots from films that were shot in Chania, my hometown and in which I participated as an extra and a fake reconstruction of my birthplace, Exarcheia in Athens.
It explores issues of property and ownership in order to figure out what can be considered personal when it becomes fungible. Issues of fungibility of the home as real estate and as backdrop, me recollecting shards / fragments of my personal history by taking back ownership of my image and the image of my neighborhoods, by ‘stealing’ / reappropriating the imagery and claiming it as my own : the image of my body as an extra, the image of my best friends’ pet appearing in the movie, his front door, the neighborhood I was born in and which has been shook by police brutality and murders since the 70s, now reappearing as a décor in an action blockbuster film containing riot scenes, apparently reconstructed in Tenerife. Trying to reconstruct a sense of personal history by taking back those images.
The format of the flyer is reconstructing the mental space of an invitation, the prop of an event, the event being sharing the recaptured reappropriated moments with the audience.
UNREAL ESTATE
Unreal Estate is a work consisting of 6 postcards and a postcard stand, depicting screenshots grabbed from two Hollywood productions. Both films portray locations in Greece fundamental to my autobiography : In “The Two Faces of January”, Chania, my hometown, becomes the backdrop for a contemporary production of a ‘60s thriller, in which local residents (myself included) were conscripted as extras. For Jason Bourne, an action movie featuring a ten-minute long fictional riot sequence , the neighborhood of Exarcheia, a historical site of political struggle and police brutality as well as my birthplace, is reconstructed in Tenerife.
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 friends doorway, a rooftop, a fictional surveillance map and a CCTV monitor of my neighborhood, the work operates as a tactical counter-economy. Reclaiming ownership of those personal -yet under copyright- images and cartographies, 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, in a feedback loop where the virtual feeds back into the real. By turning an ubiquitus instrument of tourism and commodification into a sculptural prop, the installation becomes a tactical event moving beyond the flattening of place into real estate, backdrop and spectacle towards an invitation to a reappropriation.