Experiential Sculpture: A text by Yiannis Theodoropoulos

For the past 30 years I have been photographing objects and spaces that are usually inside my house in Mangoufana, but also in other places far from my home. I begun by photographing interiors of greenhouses; their bright domes gave me the impression that I was standing inside a futuristic temple. Almost concurrently, I started photographing various structures, usually illegally built, that make up the modern Greek landscape at the outskirts of urban centres. Later, I started photographing inside my house, almost exclusively. I call that work experiential sculpture.

By experiential I mean that the things I photograph are not random objects or landscapes that happened to lie before me, but things that are charged with a psychological, but also a physical, part of my everyday life. Essentially, they convey parts of my history, and so, I suggest, of our history; I emphasise this, meaning that they comprise a mosaic of aspects of modern Greek reality. It is not history recorded in linear fashion; I would say it resembles a psychograph, like a mirror that reflects my internal life, with the ‘within’ and the ‘outside’ engaging in an ongoing dialogue … Essentially I rediscover inside my house the landscapes outside, and outside I rediscover the landscapes that lie within me … We are our world (our home).

Translated by Nikos Masouridis.