"flotsam & jetsam"
DIMITRIS KARAISKOS & YIANNIS HADJIASLANIS
Redaction: Dimitris Karaiskos & Yiannis Hadjiaslanis
Translation: Evgenios Pieris & Karolina Sardi
Pages: 100
Price: €12
Format: 14x14
ISBN: 978-960-89877-0-8
At any given moment- even as the very words are reading are being written- there is an amazing number of objects dancing along the waves, in seas, oceans and bays all over the world. Night and day they carry on their odd journey: each traveling from the point at which they were first discarded or lost to reach that final destination- to the place where they’ll go to ‘rest’; a sandy beach or quaint bay on some small island, a nondescript stretch of coastline near the port or perhaps the roft between two rocks on a remote cape in the middle of nowhere.
So, what happens when a human hand picks up one of these objects and examines it carefully, with interest and perhaps the hint of a smile? All of a sudden, they're plucked from their state of oblivion and nonexistence, only to exist again. While on their journey towards that "cold nothing-nothing" where everything ends up eventually, according to American physicist Austin Gleeson, they get a new lease on life, or at least on that strange phase between living and disappearing. They become something again; in our eyes they could be a thousand fascinating things. Singularly and collectively they speak through the static of time about our culture and civilization; they yell voicelessly about the destruction of our environment and with knowing nods talk of their journey and inevitable destination, whispering sarcastically and at times sorrowfully about the perseverance of time
" Yiannis Hadjiaslanis took into his studio the thousand or so objects I had collected over the past 5 years and he treated them with awe, respect and a childlike enthusiasm. With every click of his camera it was as if he himself had dug them up from the sand; it was as if he had been there with me. Even though some of the objects in this publication were found on the four corners of the earth as well as in Greece, the majority were found on the northern beaches of Tinos and Andros. From Paraporti and Vori in Andros to the inaccessible tiny bays between Kolibithra and Panormos in Tinos, I walked across the sand as if searching for treasures that I somehow knew I would find. What I always expected was that one large find or extraordinary discovery. It never came, though I am certain that it is simply hiding somewhere in a remote cape, perhaps wedged in between two rocks, keeping company with the crabs and the ebb of the tides."
text by Dimitris Karaiskos
Flotsam has connections with words such as floating and flotation, and was found in the seventeenth century in the context of maritime insurance. Jetsam concerns material thrown away, and is connected to the word jettison and to the French verb "jeter".
