Consumption / Remembrance / Abduction

Consumption, 2002 / Remembrance, 2002 / Abduction 2003

[video loop (ap:10min)]

from the series Europeans , presented in the exhibition "The Rape of Europe"

PHOTINI PAPAHATZI

(Greece, Athens b.1966 / act: London) VIDEO

«I’ve been on my own for too long:

unknown woman to her boyfriend, on a sunny day, in the street,

 London, 15th of September 2003 at 14:58.

Abduction or Rape? Who knows ? who cares anymore?

A middle age woman, Europe has been on her own for so long… The days when Zeus disguised as a bull was flirting her are long erased by the whirlpool of historical time and myth.

Consumption, 2002

Europa is decaying from aggregated, atomised, mindless consumerism. While approximately 1.2 billion people (nearly one fourth of humankind) now live below the threshold of basic needs, Europe - as part of the Western World - has ‘enjoyed’ more goods and services since 1950 than the rest of the world in the whole human history. No wonder she now suffers from depression [1]. Europe modified echoes in a conversation with a plastic bag and a bottle of coke under the score of a Bach piece.

Remembrance, 2002

The continent’s tradition drags on with mutated values and morals. As new and old ‘Berliners’ support the Marathon for ‘good causes’, unconsciously their cheers and claps synchronize with the nostalgic song of Diana: «I'm so young and you're so old / This, my darling, I’ve been told / I don’t care just what they say / Cause forever I will pray / You and I will be as free / As the birds up in the trees / Oh, please stay by me, Diana…»

Abduction 2003

A charity event for bankers… The great European dream has been subverted by corporate power …Whatever has been defined as Europe with the French Revolution, the Enlightenment , May ’68 is been killed by from what we have defined as Creation of Value. Creation of Value improves the quality of our lives. Improvements on the quality of our lives make us happier.

In the auction of the charity event for bankers, a week is sold for £14,000, as much as a year’s salaries for a middle Briton, while one billion people on this planet live on less than a 1$ per day, the minimum living standard – maybe less than the cost of the price of the ice cream that is being served generously as a dessert ….

[1] The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2010 depression will become the second commonest disease in the developed world (George Monbiot in “Dying of Consumption” published in The Guardian, 28th December 2000).