Maria Mavropoulou was born in 1989 and she lives and works in Athens, Greece. Currently, she is completing her MFA studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts, from where she got her BA in 2014. She has studied painting and sculpture, although since 2011 her main medium is photography. Most of her images are not captured but ”created” by literary creating the objects she is photographing or by altering the original image in her own aesthetic. Her work has been presented in exhibitions in Greece and abroad and publicized in multiple magazines. Since 2014 she is a member of the collective of artists Depression Era that inhabit the urban and social landscapes of the crisis in Greece.
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, Greek 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. Could this blurry atmosphere be smoke from a violent riot, the Sahara desert’s dust cloud or is it just morning fog?
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 uncanniness. 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.
Although photographed as landscapes, it’s not nature, but the human presence through its absence, that is the subject of the photographs. 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.
To view more of Maria’s work please visit her website.