On Wednesday the 14th of May from 19.00 to 22.00 the group photography exhibition The Fabric of a City will be inaugurated at the Eos gallery

Participating artists: Karin Elise Fajersson, Pavlina Kallitsi, Panos Kaltsas, Dimitra Kitsiou, Terpsichori Kouzouni,Theoni Leivaditi, Anna Nenadi, Pigi Psimenou, Litsa Spiliotopoulou, Tonia Violaki, Flora Zafeiraki, Maria Zygomala

Curated by: Kostas Ioannidis and Eleni Mouzakiti

The exhibition features twelve photographic series on the city of Berlin. The images deal with the city in a variety of strategies in terms of form and medium. The texture, atmosphere, taste, and feel of the city are brought out in collages, which are closely linked to the art-historical traces of the interwar city, as well as in direct, sometimes frontal encounters with the city's architecture, people, streets, and surroundings. Common ground is the history of Berlin which emerges through the architectural currents, through its traces in both the expected and unexpected places, through the personalities who lived here and whose shadows still linger in buildings, squares and alleys, through figures of film fiction that have become as real as the people you meet in the parks and lakes. The heavy, grey past whose texture and feel have impregnated the materiality of the city coexists with its colourful present. The German capital is in constant motion and in an unstoppable process of reinventing itself, a process that people like Blixa Bargeld of the band Einstürzende Neubauten, who has sung about the city many times, mock at every opportunity.

The poetics of fragmentation, which always suits the language of the medium, lies behind the iconoplastic strategies used in the body of these works. Anna Nenadi in her series Optics mostly stands on graffiti-covered facades, conveying the rhythms of the city more than any other information. For Dimitra Kitsiou (Uncanny forgetfulness / Ιn Berlin with Walter Benjamin), this strategy is also crucial because it has its theoretical origins in the work of Walter Benjamin. His memories of his childhood in Berlin offer her landmarks as occasions for wandering. Flora Zafiraki in her work Faint lines shifts her investigative gaze to the Cold War era, referring to historical-collective traumas by focusing her lens on details. Similarly, Karin Elisa Fajersson in her work Remains of a Future Past delves into the memory of the city through the micro-history of fragments, using, among other things, the collage method. Collage is also used by Maria Zygomala in Splinters, who creates a multi-layered visual narrative with snapshots from different moments in time, in which archival material plays an important role. In the morphological counterpoint of Zygomala's surfaces full of folds, Litsa Spiliotopoulou's surfaces in All The Beautiful refer to the modernist purity of a world and to an aspect of the city's architectural history in which the decorative element is understood as an almost criminal deviation from functionalist purism.

On the other hand, Panos Kaltsas' photographs of street scenes in his series Berlin Unscripted document a different reality, less elaborate, less façade and more everyday life. Pavlina Kallitsis's lens in her series Hochbunker Pallasstrasse also touches a barely gentrified corner of Berlin. The still ominous, massive bunker on the border of Kreuzberg and Schöneberg intertwines almost inextricably with the huge housing complex of mainly Turkish immigrants and eloquently shows the connections between present and past that make up some of the most interesting parts of the city. Terpsichore Kouzouni (Lakeside euphoria) and Theoni Livaditi in Berlin's Blue Veins take on the role of the flaneur, photographing mainly suburban areas associated with the recreation of the inhabitants of the metropolis. Their subjects are the same, but the distances they keep from the people and their gaze on them are distinct. Close but also far from another point of view are the images of Tonia Violaki and Pigi Psimmenou. The people of Psimenou in her series of portraits I saw you pose for the photographer with a disarming immediacy. They are the colour and the soul of the city. Violaki in her project I can imagine anything also photographs people but in the way that Wim Wenders films his angels in his iconic film about the “Sky over Berlin” (“Wings of Desire”). In the movie that so catalytically shaped the way we still see, feel and hear this city today”.
Kostas Ioannidis