We do not own the world, we are a part of it
Australian Aborigines’ ancient proverb
Follow your art gallery in collaboration with "a.antonopoulou.art" gallery in Athens present for the first time in Kythera the photographer Yannis Tzortzis in an exhibition of environmental photography entitled Natura Transita or in other words, Nature in transition. It took a pandemic to find out that we are unable to contain the endless flow that shapes the framework of our existence. The arrogant illusion of a convenient "stability" that we had associated with the supposed "superiority" of our species collapsed. We are part of nature, which is constantly in a state of transition. As the the Curator Iraklis Papaioannou wrote, "people have never felt that they have such an inextricably shared destiny as in this long-lasting holding of breath that has permeated humanity horizontally". And environmental photography has never been used with greater sensitivity or more compelling documentation in order to capture just that.
The exhibition of Yannis Tzortzis, beyond his endless experiential wandering in the ocean of individual responsibility and authentic artistic expression, is an urgent call for collective awareness of how much we as well as future generations still depend on our choices. Nature will continue the transition without us anyway.
Yannis Tzortzis is a member of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and has travelled the world with the organization Green Project under the auspices of the Greek National Commission for UNESCO, to awaken social consciousness through environmental photography.
His work has been internationally acclaimed as Best Practice by the Hellenic National Commission for UNESCO in the Annual Report of National Commissions of 2014, while he has been awarded the First Prize in Arts of the Public Book Awards 2015 in Athens, the First Award 2014 of the International Photo Competition of the EU Energy Community, Vienna, the Grand International Participation Award of the Festival del’ Image Environnementale 2010 in Paris and the Third Award for the Clean Development Mechanism at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 2010 in Cancun, Mexico. In 2018, the documentary film "Sudamerica", produced by the Green Project, has been awarded with distinction at the "4th Athens Documentary Film Festival", which has been co-organised by the Greek Documentary Association and the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, while in 2019 it has won the special prize "El Rey: Espíritu de España" of the Barcelona International Film Festival.
