Except the Clouds
“The European Union has put Greece in the situation of a sex worker: it ero-tourists her at the same time as it insults her, puts her in debt and wants her, forbids her to travel and demands that she spreads her thighs in the face of financial speculation. However, the demonstrations, fires and strikes in Greece are a sign of the impossibility of completely destroying the processes of resistance.” (Paul B. Preciado)
Athens is an oxymoron city. Its flamboyant mythological heritage coexists with its dark and dramatic current political and economic situation. Its sun shines with a thousand lights, a blinding light that reveals its violence and twilight faces. And yet there is a much more intense life force than elsewhere to be felt. It seems to be a city in permanent revolution, in which young Athenians are presently in revolt, to face a society that can no longer think about the future by learning from their past. ‘Except the Clouds’ aims not only to catch this contradiction in images, but also reflects on the place and the fragility of the human in a civilization in decline and asks: what’s left when everything falls apart?
Bérangère Fromont combines digital manipulations, re-appropriation of archives and geometric composition to form a single, hybrid image. With the sum of all different temporalities she draws a fresco of the present time, as in the streets of Athens, where the ancient and the contemporary mix and mingle.
