Parallel Crisis: the immobilized time itself

...It is not a fantasy, if by that we mean an Imaginary effect. Nor is it as such a Real object..It is even less the organ.. that it symbolises ... It is a signifier .... It is the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified. Jacques Lacan, 1958 The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but signifies Heracletus, late 6th century BCE Over the last six years a destructive financial crisis has struck Greece, dismantling an already wrecked social balance and driving the population into a state of collective depression. A condition of stagnation is ruling the capital city of Athens. The project Parallel Crisis is a creative document that addresses the ways in which the Medium of Photography is capable of describing this socio-economical event. An uneasy affinity develops between the property of photography to produce events of immobilized time and the negation of social time that widespread crisis instigates. What photography is really recording in Greece, is a certain condition of numbness: subjects without the possibility of development, crippling unemployment, confined migrants, neighborhoods reigned by silence and fear. In these conditions, the Medium suspends time that has already stalled It is well known that the media have reorganized our way of life; how this manifests within the bounds of a western society where limits have been reached and dreams have been buried is of particular interest to the Parallel Crisis project. The Project investigates society's involvement not with certain types of icons (movies, advertisements, television) but with the hardware of Photography, with the immobilized time itself. it is a crisis, sure, but parallel to what? Parallel crisis, which is both the title and the overall theme of this series, speaks of a crisis in time on a multiple levels. Still pictures (photographs) betray the symptoms of immobilized time; as such, they grant photography a certain degree of self-consciousness where what is narrated is the story of a people whose time is already lost, the sad story of entrapped existence.