photographs, text, editing and desing: Yorgos Yatromanolakis
text editing and consulting: Alexandra Saliba
cover artwok: Ariadne Pediotaki
typography: No más / No More
handmade bookbinding: Evangelia Biza Studio
offset printing: Kostopoulos Printing House
published by ZOETROPE
athens 2019
limited edition 191 copies
/ interviews and articles:
The British Journal of Photograph,
/ text:
I returned back to the same place. I felt lost.
Within a strange tranquillity, something destructive arose inside me.
I had sunk into a quiet desperation. I denied my past.
I tried a hundred times to erase my memory. I was craving change.
Flowing into the night, I became a wild animal.
I confronted nature and death. I wanted to live. Feel every moment.
Walk against the whistling wind. Breathe and dive into the cold sea.
Harvest moon. Everything caught in the fire.
I walked with her in the blue dusk. Following my heartbeat.
I lapsed into a transformation, an unexpected alignment with the stars.
/ project statement:
This series arose from my unforeseen return to my homeland and my residence there for four years. Isolated in the countryside of the island, Ι was constantly confronted with my traumatic past, my memories and myself. Gradually, through wandering in nature, a conceivable field of action was created within me, an intermediate space full of transformative dynamics, a place of becoming. I surrendered to the fluidity of this space, to a paradoxical and cosmogenic ceremony. I was faced with the most enigmatic aspects of myself; I was searching for a new reality in which I would be able to exist. These photographs are part of a notebook, constructed through this experience, attempting to capture the cycle of an internal process of metamorphosis.
/ description:
"The Splitting of the Chrysalis & the Slow Unfolding of the Wings" is inspired by the anthropological rites of passage that mark the transitions from one phase of life to another. Through this work, Yorgos Yatromanolakis attempts to capture in a poetic way the cycle of an internal process of metamorphosis. Due to an unforeseen return to his homeland, he finds himself isolated into a dystopian reality, confronting his traumatic past and memories. Gradually distancing himself from anything intimate and familiar and through his photographic practice, he creates a new world, a mysterious and borderline place. Within this liminal place, metaphorically seen as a chrysalis cocoon, everything is in flux. Being is in a state of becoming in betwixt and between of what had happened and what is about to happen. Within the narrative of the book, this experience is intertwined with the biological processes of transformation in nature, which are taking place in parallel and with which the photographer coexists and identifies. Most of the photographs are shot in between night and day, when the liminal light visually generates a peculiar and revealing condition of transformation and illusion. The images are enclosed in the book as notes of an experience embarking from deconstruction and “splitting” to reach out to fulfillment and “flying” and as a whole they set the points of a course towards a new existential reality.