Author: emptysquare

Nikos Karouzos – Poems on the tape recorder

Directed by Yannis Karpouzis
Written by Ilias Liatsopoulos – Andreas Vakalios

Logline                                                                                                                                                                                    In the midst of the economic crisis, a persistent researcher delves into the eventful life and the unexplored work of preeminent Greek modernist poet, Nikos Karouzos. Through photos, archives, super 8s, videotapes and memories, he travels back in time accompanying the poet from the traumatic postwar history of Greece to the Academy of Stockholm and all the way to the 1921 rebellion of Kronstadt in order to find a lost film footage.

Creative Documentary
Duration: 100 min
Greece
Completed February 2020

Funded by Greek Film Center and Hellenic broadcasting corporation.

Cast: Dimitris Katalifos
Director: Yannis Karpouzis
Writers: Andreas Vakalios, Ilias Liatsopoulos
Director of Photography: Yannis Kanakis, Yannis Karpouzis
Research: Ilias Liatsopoulos
Translations: Costas Koutsikouris
Editing: Leonidas Papafotiou
Original soundratck: Cleon Antoniou, Giannis Haroulis, Lefteris Andriotis
Sound: Costas Fylaktidis, 17 Poisoned Englishmen
Color Grading: Grigoris Arvanitis / authorwave

Left-wing and Christian, a hermit and an alcoholic, the damned poet Nikos Karouzos is the central figure of this hybrid-genre essay film. In order to piece together the poet’s life journey, a frustrated researcher takes us through the Aegean archipelago’s prison islands, the Swedish capital of Stockholm, the historical Russian island of Kronstadt, the “city of crisis” Athens, and across a vast archive of celluloid memories. A story about life and death; Greece’s troubled post-war history and the advent of Spring.

Parallel Crisis

Photobook

Hardcover 116 pages 19 X 27
Photographs: Yannis Karpouzis
Design: Ioannis Markakis
Texts by: Moritz Neumuller, Yannis Karpouzis
Printed by: Kostopoulos printing house
Published by: Empty Square With the support of Greek Ministry of Culture June 2021 – ISBN 978-618-84981-0-5

Description
After the year 2010, 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-economic event.

“Each animal is defined by a blow” Heracletus, late 6th century BCE.

 

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 been stalled. Photography itself is conceived as a metaphor, a mirror of the financial crisis. Even further, the immobilized time of Photography intersects with the negated time of its subjects (referents). Parallel Crisis is in the end a project about a relation. The relation between a social crisis and a still image (a photograph).

This project was awarded:
The Descubrimientos prize PHotoEspana 2015
Athens Photo Festival Portfolio Review 2016

Exhibitions:
PhotoEspana 2016
Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award 2016
Med photo 1
Photobeijin 2016
Benaki Museum – Deste foundation – New Museum of New York
Athens photo festival 2017
PH Museum – Which Europe Photobook Week Aarhus Dummy Award 2018
Photo Bienalle – Thessaloniki contemporary art museum