Land Ends / Pavlos Fysakis

[…] Boundaries are drawn to create and maintain a spatial order:
to gather some people and things in certain places and
keep other people away from those spaces.
Each model of spatial order divides humans
into “desirables” and “undersirables”.
Each boundary is meant to prevent the two categories
from mixing in one space.

Zigmound Baumann
For the Europeans the sense of a geographical end
is imbued with a sense of finality, not beginning.
As for borders, their function was always a positive one:
to define their (our) safe world.
But how is a European identity defined?

What is the limit, and what does it define?
Trying to find the answer, I departed on my first journey,
to Gavdos, in December of 2006.

From South to North, from East to West.
I returned from the final destination of my journey,Sintra,Portugal,
in February of 2008,
and the same questions were still in my head.
The four ends of Europeare as different between themselves
morphologically as their inhabitants are similar.
In the South, Gavdos and its coarse morphology,
in the North, Nordkapp and the white silence of the tundra,
in the West, popular Sintra and the splendor of its old summer palaces,
in the East, the Urals and the weighty legacy of the goulags,
the nuclear factories and the most radioactively contaminated region of the world.
Common denominator, the people.

The most important, but also the most unpredictable factor.
Whether Russian or Greek, Portuguese or Norwegian,
the people on the frontiers seem to have gone deeply inside themselves.  
They are surveyors of these European ends, which might finally be the beginning.

Pavlos Fysakis
 

Co-organization: Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete
Co-production: Thessaloniki Museum of Photography,
Norwegian Empassy in Athens, LightRoom Projects
With the support: Vardinogianneion Foundation, Region of Crete.