W1D promo

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• published: 13 Mar 2016
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A solo photo documentary exhibition by Cyntia Tzitzis that took place on the 3rd-26th November 2015 at the iconic Friends Room of the Hellenic Centre. W1D, Cynthia says: is the postcode of Greek Street in London. It took the name after a Greek church that was built in 1677. This photography exhibition tells the story of 31 Greek professionals living and working in London. Mainly young people who came to the UK the last few years in search of a better future. Iris Kritikou, art critic, writes: “While pursuing success and happiness, these young people keep carrying Greece’s debris with them, by creating easy to carry memory tool cases, by making associations not so obvious to the bare eye, by making new friends who could have been part of the childhood they left behind, by inventing places in between, by simulating and comparing flavors and scents, habits and experiences. The 31 acquaintances and friends of the photographer, who were chosen by her for different important reasons, compose this chapter and set a pause to it. They generously offer to Cynthia’s lens the small fertile gardens of ‘now’ that they had to create and inhabit while at the same time, they were leaving ‘there’ behind. And they allowed the photographer’s penetrative glance to focus and capture all those elements that they love and all those that they are in an eloquent, unadorned and articulate manner.By choosing the space and setting the angle of the shot, Cynthia Tzitzis brings the ‘faces’ on her lens –literally and metaphorically- in a direct confrontation with the viewer who is allowed a temporary intrusion into their lives. By composing the Materia prima of the image, framing this image with surgical precision and clarity, translucently inserting the subjects and objects that it is consisted of, determining either the ‘together’ or the ‘solitary’ of the protagonists, organising the microcosm of her models with absolute limpidity and image-making dexterity, Cynthia Tzitzis creates a bespoke and exceptionally eloquent register of people, who act consciously while feeling nostalgic, but mainly while knowing and interpreting the past, seizing the present and anticipating the future with an optimistic self-awareness. She implies their personal and professional identity, deconstructing and reconstructing all the stories that they left behind them and by outlining the coordinates, which set the current time of their expeditious British biorhythms”.