Rites of passage
Invitation to the Athens Photo Festival
To 27 May
Rencontres de la jeune photographie internationale 2023
In 2018, when Maria Choulaki came to Niort as part of an ERASMUS exchange with a school in the Niort area, a reciprocal exchange project was launched between La Villa Pérochon and PhotoXenia, the Cretan organization she founded.
The first exchanges for the benefit of emerging Greek and French artists have already taken place: in 2021/2022, Yorgos Yatromanolakis and Angela Svoronou’s exhibition will be hosted in Niort during an Artist Residency, followed by Joséphine Vallé-Franceschi and Clémence Elman, who will be in residence in Crete for the Rencontres de la jeune photographie internationale 2022. This collaboration will continue in 2023.
The exchange project between Greek and French artists is being developed in close partnership with theAthens Photo Festival.
This year, we are hosting an exhibition designed by Manolis Moresopoulos, curator of the Athens Photo Festival, who will in turn host the exhibition Les interstices by Frédéric Stucin, which we produced following a three-year Artist Residency in a psychiatric hospital in Niort.
Rites of passage
The exhibition presents six contemporary Greek artists whose common thread is their participation in recent editions of the Athens photo festival. The title of the exhibition underlines the fragile perspective of passage through a liminal space of absence and presence.
This journey bears witness to the cyclical transitions of life, death and rebirth. It offers a glimpse into a world of rituals, metaphors, imprints and transformed objects. The works explore ideas of spirituality, religion, community, family, loss and the passage of time.
The artists use their personal memories as reference points to delve into the concept of liminality and how it can affect our mental existence. Memory is seen as a dynamic experience and a spatial connection with past and present. Their evocative images take the viewer into the limbo between fiction and reality, drawing new transitions from dawn to dusk, or from light to shadow.
The exhibition addresses universal rites of passage and the specific life trajectories of Greece, a country between old and new, past, present and future.
Practical information
Photographers on display
Catherine Chatzidimitriou
Nyfes
Chatzidimitriou examines the stereotypes of married life and the roles a woman is called upon to play.
Marilia Fotopoulou
Iconostases
Fotopoulou records and interprets a practice and custom associated with the loss and mystery of death.
Myrto Papadopoulos
Eleu sis
Papadopoulos explores a place where the history of industrial growth and decline meets ancient myths about life, death and rebirth.
Kosmas Pavlidis
Sunny days A true story
Inspired by his childhood memories, Pavlidis visits the places of his first summer days that have been left to the whims of time and nature.
Ioanna Sakellaraki
The Truth is in the Soil
Inspired by ancient Greek laments, Sakellaraki explores ancestral mourning methods in traditional Greek communities.
Yiannis Theodoropoulos
Theodoropoulos transforms everyday objects in unexpected ways, producing images of ephemeral “experiential sculptures”.
