Yannis Tzortzis

Yannis Tzortzis and the Green Project team have undertaken a project that is undeniably hard to comprehend in our times: they followed the old “Silk Road” by car, crossing vast, remote expanses in order to reach China and to focus their research there on the propagation of renewable energy sources in the countries they would be passing through. In old episodes of the television series Star Trek, thanks to unique technology, the show’s heroes were somehow vaporized and then “teleported” to another spatial dimension.

Tzortzis preferred to follow the difficult route so as to achieve the feeling of the relation between space and time. Along with ancient memories, he recorded the new era. He captures endless expanses and vast highways that cross the monotonous lands of central Asia that make U.S. Route 66 (heralded in song) seem like Athens’ Solonos Street during rush hour. And along with Marco Polo’s traces, vast lands are covered with windmills, while we constantly feel on our skin either the absence or the presence of water. It seems that the last movie in the James Bond series has caught the essence of our times, stressing the fact that water will replace precious metals, diamonds and oil as the currency of the future.

Yannis Tzortzis’ photographs differ significantly from related works published from time to time with emphasis on the old “Silk Road”. The emphasis here is elsewhere. He has captured the dust of the centuries along with one great hope: perhaps that not everything is lost. Not yet…

THANASIS MOUTSOPOULOS