Dislocations
In ‘Dislocations’ Elena Efeoglou documents the gradual disappearance of the village of Mavropigi by linking images from Google Maps with photographs of the area. Mavropigi is located on the edge of a lignite mine in Greece, the largest in the Balkans, operating 24 hours a day. In order to expand, the company buys out local residents, evicts them from their homes and razes the villages to the ground.
When Efeoglou started photographing in 2017, most people had already left and the ghost villages were awaiting the demolition hammers to erase all traces of a previous life. Efeoglou’s project aims to capture Mavropigi, which has been wiped off the face of the earth, underlining the transformation of the landscape: the village only exists in the virtual world; so, although you are able to navigate its streets online, it is in fact long gone.
