Dimitri Mellos

For most people, the idea of Greece evokes either images of sunny beaches and picturesque whitewashed villages, or, more recently, depictions of the financial crisis or tragic images of refugees trying to cross over to Europe. With this project, my aim has been to deconstruct and undermine, but also expand and enrich, the set of visual representations associated with my country of birth in our collective imagination. I attempted to capture an aspect of Greece's landscape that is very far removed from the typical picture-postcard aesthetic usually associated with the country. I also wanted to evoke what I think of as the often improvised, play-it-by ear character of that part of the world: the somewhat laissez-faire attitude of Greeks toward their lived environment, which gives rise to an interesting and delicate interplay and inter-permeability between public and private spaces in Greece. Often, objects that would seem to have no place in the midst of nature are found scattered through the landscape. I think there is something deeply sad and surreal, and sometimes even almost cruel (but at other times very tender) about these traces of human presence in the middle of nowhere.