The Voice of the Cicada

I live in the southern suburbs of Athens. Inhabited continuously since the ancient times, this is a place characterized by material abundance and luxurious lifestyle. At the same time, barbed fences and surveillance cameras turn the houses into border barricades and the streets into an urban “no-man’s land”. This setting poses questions about the role of my own domestic comfort zone and whether protection and restriction are actually the two sides of the same coin. By documenting the paradoxical elements that surround my everyday life, I try to make sense of myself and address my own existential questions. Seen together, these elements form heterotopias that are extracted from their surroundings, offer a new viewpoint and make a novel comment upon the existing references. Having the documentary genre as a starting point, the reality that I present is therefore a distilled one, a visual testimony of my endeavor to re-create the environment and the people that surround me. My heroes, as alternate versions of myself, dwell in affluence, within their dazzling, colorful bubbles. Both watching and being watched, they look like fireflies in a sealed jar filled with sugar water.