Zisis Kardianos

With the “off-season” project, I’m trying to discover into spaces-relics of a cheap and vulgar seasonality, some nuggets of beauty or even peculiar order. The place is the tourist resort of Laganas in Zakynthos during the recurrent periods of its utter abandonment. One place that is familiar and intimate to me, at the same time beloved and repellent. I approach it in a way that is not accusatory or judgmental, but rather condescending and gentle, accepting all of its foibles and its excesses. The images that I seem to look after – but then maybe not – are leaping out through the details of a disorderly built, decorated and sprinkled environment. What impresses me most in photography – and many others – is its ability to make magical even the ugliest and boring place. But I use its depictive power, the evidence and the information that can carry, only as the base line of a route that winds up in the fabrication of an immaterial reality. It’s a fictional world of sensations and illusions that is constructed with trashy materials, light, colour and always with the catalytic contribution of serendipity.

Zisis Kardianos