the rustling of the garden

Mantas’ series emerges as a kind of microsociology of contemporary Greek space, urban and peri-urban, with gardens serving as the cause and pretext: running through residential front yards, shady ground floor parking spaces where the flora exists latently and green terraces. It highlights green as an indicator of inequality and class difference, in a society that adored concrete passionately, perhaps considering it as an element of rigid stability in a country trudging through constant uncertainties. Private gardens, at times a field of personal care that calms the gaze and at others an elaborate decoration or fig leaf of a brutal society, thus resembles a polyhedral reflection of our relationship with natural elements. And if these photographs often contain a vernacular perspective, it is because they emerge a sample and representation of Greece’s flesh.

Hercules Papaioannou