9 - 18 juni 2017
Malmö Fotobiennal:
SWEET SIXTY
Photography by Lina Manousoginannaki
The series SWEET SIXTY is a series inspired by the economical crisis which has hit Greece in the last six years. I started working on this project as early as 2011. It is an allegorical work focusing on the generation of people which as up to now has been hit more harshly by the crisis, the retired. When the crisis started the retired people were the first target of the then Greek government in order to assemble money fast. People who worked their entire lives found themselves protesting for the obvious; to keep their right to a worthy life. Retirement is often seen as period of our working lives when one can finally enjoy the days left on this earth as they choose. Suddenly these people were forced to a lesser lifestyle than the one they had hopped and worked for up to now.
In 2011 the whole world saw Greeks as bad citizens who stole, did not pay taxes and were leading reckless lives, way over their economical potential. In European countries the general idea cultivated by the media was that they deserved to be punished. The years passed and slowly it became obvious that the so called punishment of the Greeks was a plan to save European banks that had suffered losses by the economical crisis of the western world. The people who participated in this project are all retired. I decided to dress them in superhero customs for two reasons. The first one was a reference to a globalised culture and thus making them recognisable to everyone. The second one was to point out the fact that suddenly the elderly were asked to start over again. Start over the struggle against governments who stole from them, who terrorised them, who discarded them as lesser citizens, just like they had done in the past. Because these people are the ones who fought against the dictatorship of 1967-1974, they are the same ones who reconstructed a politically broken society and now they are still called once more to breathe and re-boot in this brave new world. A lot of time has elapsed since the finalisation of this work (2013) and as I look back I see a group of people who even though had been broken by political situations agreed to participate in this project.
/Lina Manousoginannaki
Arrangör: Malmö Fotobiennal, Folkets Bio Malmö, ABF Malmö.
MALMÖ FOTOBIENNAL 2017 - THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE
"Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior."
/Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
The 2017 edition of Malmö Fotobiennal celebrates 50 years since the release of the essay “The Society of the Spectacle” by French philosopher Guy Debord. Debord devoted his essay to understand the structure in which we are living in, where the social relations are interpolated by a society of representations, the being is replaced into having and appearing. To be is to consume, and the images serve as a mediator of the spectacle. We take his work and his concepts as a starting point for Malmö Fotobiennal 2017, an attempt to understand how these ideas would apply to the use of photography today.
In addition to acknowledging the 50-year anniversary, we aim to problematize the power, the authenticity and the message carried by the photographic image. Another goal is to update the features and role of photography in society today. How are visual artists representing a society in transformation?
