I take of places. Yorgos Petrou

About

over there

my body is foreign
it’s in the land
flowers, soil, seeds, and clay
made of it

it’s in construction
in the destruction
the derelict
the abandoned
abundance
my body is there

in the primal stuff

the raw
queer in soil
in the photos

potatoes I take

of places

He works with photography, sculpture, moving image, and performance. His practice seeks to examine and analyse geological strata, political and historical events, and to “excavate” elements that it then manipulates, displaces, photographs, and re-photographs to compose imagery that both contributes and responds to the understanding of contemporary identity of a place. The juxtaposition of image and object aims to explore the appropriation of specific locations by personal, cultural, and political discourses. It deals with what connects individuals to those places and how they become sites of memory legend and trauma. In this conceptual context he looks at the human body mythologically, culturally, physically, and emotionally and how it relates to the land; how it can become a site of individuality, hybridisation, sacrifice, heroism, trauma, and dichotomy.

In 2019, his piece Unfamiliar was performed at the Barbican Centre, Arcola Theatre, and Battersea Arts Centre, London, UK. In 2017 his work Landmarks was exhibited in Planétes, the inaugural exhibition of Cultural Capital of Europe Pafos. In 2015 his video works My Brother, Copper, and Rough-cut were included in Identalterity at the 5th Biennale of Thessaloniki. In the year he graduated he showed work at Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011, ICA London and he was commissioned to create work for the Royal Society Summer Exhibition Festival at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, supported by the Wellcome Trust.