Έτσι όπως είναι #COVID19 On-Going Project

An illustrated depiction of our own reality, now that the experiences are shared.

April 2020.

Athena Sotiroglou and Evangelina Karyophylli are in quarantine. The horizon of mandatory stay at home is still unclear. They are trying to listen and define their daily life. What are the similarities with that of the familiar faces? Thus a new project is born, starring the group Potential.

The inspiration for the project was Michael Kliën's text "The Story of the Polar Bear". Unsung heroes, "polar bears", isolated in their own space, common actions with a content that is necessarily banal. As each one really is. It is this poetry of the meaningless, of routine, of confinement and loneliness that motivates the young artists to illustrate people in an uncertain moment of humanity. Every week a new hero is added to the collection. Until this loneliness is absorbed by the collective subjectivity.

"I don't know if you are familiar with the story of the polar bear living in a very small cage. When she was released into a larger enclosure, she continued to move around in her previous spatial frame, left to right again, just as she was used to. So that bear is us!

Stuck in the patterns that are formed from birth, we carry rules that are not our own. And rules have this awesome feature, they can largely define us. We crazy people, shut in on ourselves, accept error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice. Enclosed walls continue to stand, dulling our minds."

(Excerpt from Michael Kliën's text "The story of the polar bear")

Contributors to the project:

Concept-Idea: Athena Sotiroglou, Evangelina Karyophylli, Eleni Demopoulou
Illustration: Athena Sotiroglou, Evangelina Karyophylli, Orestis Dimopoulos
Coordination-Organization: Eleni Demopoulou
Text editing: Eleni Efthymiou
Pictured heroes: Team Potential