Spray Vision, (Walk the Can) #1, Canaries Cafe to Ermou street, Kerameikos, September 2014

What are you looking at when walking in the city? Do you look at the faces and eyes of the people or is it urbanitically incorrect? Do you look at how the city is structured or, if you're living in one like Athens, focused on not falling into a hole or bumping into the cars that are parked on sidewalks? Is it a matter of going from A to B on paths route-inly maped in your brain or is it a narrative of moments unfolding on your way through life?

"Εnough with all the enoughs"

Inside Canaries cafe toilets

I've been to some beautiful cities in Europe. Cities that have open spaces, green parks, beautiful modern architecture and well preserved old buildings at the same time. Some times they look so perfect, like theme parks and this can be very boring. It is like if I want to go deep in how people feel and express themselves I have to meet them in special places or occasions, like workshops, galleries.

I remember that one of the first things that captivated my imagination about my own city, early in my life, the thing that let my know about the city not being just rigid concrete but an alive organism that can express itself, was graffiti. Back then it was about expressing protest, anger but a (and with) lot of humor too. The city was full of graffiti by anarchists, that conveyed an anarchistic humor that transcended the political boundaries and could reach almost everyone.

Every Tuesday there is an open food market occupying Kerameikou street.

Salaminos pedestrian street

Pireaus street facing towards Omonoia square

Holy Trinity church

The ancient Holy Road and the cemetery of Kerameikos

Then, a new generation of painted fingertips came out on the streets and the whistling tips to the walls started taking on colorful tunes. Some of those big ugly gray concrete surfaces stopped leaning threateningly towards us and started colorful whispering stories.

Parts of a big graffiti project created more around a decade ago by an international team

I've never took a spray to paint a wall but I've been photographing graffiti for more than a decade. Most of the time I did it in a photographic unconventional way, moving my camera eye as a spray can. Like spray vision. I haven't published yet this project but soon it'll come. Here, I start posting a more conventional and new part of this project, which consists of me walking a certain route in the city, paying attention to what's around me, acknowledging the things that catch my eyes as symbols of the narrative of my life.

Ermou pedestrian street and a fresh graffiti project

My first walk starts at Canaries cafe in Kerameikos district (the pottery workshop area of ancient Athens), were I had a farewell coffee with Katerina just before she took the boat to move out of the city. From Kerameikou and Plataion street I walk to Pireous street and Ermou pedestrian road, along the ancient Iera Odos (Holy road).

OLIVENESS (Season of the Olive picking)

You have seen it all around the place. You may have noticed it, if you've slept under it, made love, meditated, enjoyed it's shadow and the beautiful rest of it's dreamy aura. For us Mediterraneans olive trees were always here. So maybe I haven't experienced the moment of epiphany when I see it for the first time but I have experienced my attention been captured by it. Travelling or walking around the landscape, finding myself looking not at trunks and branches but at sculptures of different shorts. Is it just the mind trying to create a meaning and a form out of shapes that seem to come from a dreamworld- a woman who cries, a dancer fully in his dance, a granma telling fairytales-or the tree is telling a story?

One as biological generators and transformers of the earth's ingredients and sun's warmth into the Gold, the oil, the basis of mediterranean diet and the good health of its people. It's the narrative as a symbol of peace and of victory from the ancient Olympics to the modern world and everything in between, like the culture that has been unfolding around it, the mentality, customs, biology, the wrinkles in the faces of people living by it, all that grew up in human history along with the growing of the tree. Looking around Greece's harsh landscapes, at olive trees climbing up steep hills, you must have wondered how on earth were these people of times with no cars and machines were able to manage. Take a look at very old photos of people of that era, notice how, slightly, their phisiology is defferent than ours. This difference is what these people were eating, how they were moving about their lives, what was their perception about the world. The olive tree with it's strangely shaped trunk wwas shaping the world. In Greece use to say about those times: “people survived on bread and olives”.

Yes, it's olive picking season in Afroz and Greece. We're so lucky that we have not only peaceful and wellcoming safe Buddha field but also one that keeps connecting with the cycles of the earth. I photographed Swaha in September, early picking some olives to prepare them for the table- because last year's pick was consumed out before the end of the visitor's season. He didn't want me to photograph his face at that moment but that's ok, we don't want to scare people off! And anyway, every olive tree has identity just to let it go when each olive drop is getting crushed by the stones losing her ego in an ocean of oil. In the same way, the hands that pick the olives don't need to have a face, just the wrinkles of experiencing.

So, you lucky people who have decided to join us in Afroz for the olive picking, rejoice! And those of you that are thinking about it, prepare your suitcases, or your spirits for the next season. In anyway, to talk about the rest of the photos also, September, Octobre, November is a wonderful time to come to Lesvos and Afroz. You really feel the noise of summer withering away into silence. It can even feel like when one thinks so much about something, struggling to find an answer that is hiding the harder the trying. And then one gives up just to suddenly find it effortlesly. This is how I felt after doing so much process in Afroz for the whole summer, feelling that things inside mw were so stirred up and then one morning I go out of my hut and find myself in the middle of silence, looking up into a crystal blue sky with clouds dancing in slow motion their way to emptyness and everything feeling so much in place and time...