ZOO

As part of SKG Bridges Festival that took place in Thessaloniki on May of 2019, Thessaloniki’s Museum of Photography – MOMus held a photography exhibition by young artists from the south of Europe. They invited us to curate the exhibition, to design the presentation of the works and to create the visual identity of the event. The concept of the exhibition is encapsulated in the title “ZOO” as an acronym for the words: “Zones” “Of” “Otherness”. “ZOO” has been used as a theoretical starting point to discuss alterity and space.

Our aim was to capture the complex world that the Zoo constitutes, with encompassing in- ternal incompatibilities and tensions, through the selected exhibited photographs and their matching specific sites, in order to create a dialogue that underpins the concept. The sites in the city which have been selected for the setting up of the exhibition, were scattered within the urban space of
the city’s center, in plain view. The wide spectrum of sites included both cultural and public spaces, public services and shop displays, urban passages and city squares.

Based on Zoo’s unique internal organizational logic, where animals from different parts of the world, each in a miniature of its natural surroundings, compose a supralocal allegory, forming a field of multiple emerging places and images, the works were displayed in large scale format on the city’s walls, creating unexpected hubs. Strictly framed pictures attempt to adjust organically to each location. The banners’ clear limit interacts with the vague limits of the city and creates triggering points on the spectator’s route. These stopping points scattered around the city, embrace common concepts and opposing dualities, such as limit and ambiguity, surprise and controlled inability, stasis and observation, classificatio