The Land of Error
Photographer Ioanna Sakellaraki shot her series ‘The Land of Error’ alongside the Oodnadatta Track – an unsealed outback road stretching over 617km across South Australia.
Photography Ioanna Sakellaraki
The future is split between manmade antithesis and parodies of human prediction. This is where fiction finds its justified place. The observations of reason and imagination have created a doubtfulness about ends and beginnings, matter and spirit, language and image.
The series overall attempts to create a language of an ending world by staging several ‘’topoi’’ of apocalyptic vision, through the idea of a possible revelation: what is past and passing and to come. This sense of an ending, underlines our ways of making sense of the world by placing our imagination always at the end of an era.
While forming this body of work, I have been looking into how photography can conjure memories that belong in fantasy, in eidetic recollection and some ontological reality, not in lived experience, producing images that avoid becoming descriptive and literary but integrate and complement the plot of a story, grasping the complexity and tension to anticipate an artistic vision of reality, a vision that is never far from illusion.
“I have been looking into how photography can conjure memories that belong in fantasy.”
In Greek there is a word, ‘’Kairos’’, expressing the restlessness of temporality; our way of bundling together the perception of the present, the memory of the past and the expectation of the future. The work attempts to reanimate this notion of ‘’Kairos’’, in relation to the end, and the inescapable new beginning.
“The work attempts to reanimate this notion of ‘’Kairos’’, in relation to the end, and the inescapable new beginning.”
The series has been shot alongside Oodnadatta Track, Australia's unsealed 617 km outback road. The deserted landscapes, occasionally interrupted by the light leaks the film has been exposed to, create a language of thought that is spoken elliptically, as trace of a dialogue with oneself; an anonymity, an absence, a blank space, resting between a moment of a crisis and a temporal turn, becoming the interval, the in-between, the escape.
About Ioanna
Ioanna Sakellaraki (b.1989) is a Greek visual artist. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people.
She was recently awarded a Doctoral Scholarship for undertaking her PhD in Art after graduating from an MA Photography from the Royal College of Art. She is the recipient of The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award 2018 and was named Student Photographer of the Year by Sony World Photography Awards 2020.
To see more Ioanna’s work follow her on Instagram
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