Tasos Gkaintatzis: A Photographic Project

Repetitions of breaths, signs, and screams, circular mouthings, idiolects, and words with meanings that escape language, instinctive sounds, cathartic bodily gestures, ceremonial dances, uncanny preparations, excessive, exclusive practices of togetherness, at least for most of us, us as human beings; it’s all sacred.

Gkaintatzis’ research arises from a series of photographic documentations taking place in various villages in Northern Greece, but operates as a series of metaphors and movements towards the unrevealed. His photographs speak about rituals as a way of being in time otherwise, as a means of releasing otherness by embodying it, allowing it to occupy every single cell of your body.

Through a series of photographs, his project aims to transcribe what willfully remains primitive, in order to alter the current; it longs for validating the absence of a history that has never been written, archived, or taught systemically. His gaze becomes a tribute to the ones willing to absorb and be absorbed by turbulence, to find collective freedom, to meet with the ecstatic and let it possess them, move them, lacerate them; a traversed monument to the communities that fiercely preserve, enact, and reconcile with the fear of the unknown.

Gkaintatzis’ project follows the pace of the subjects documented, and these subjects can only be touched a-rhythmically, resisting vocal rules, converting their bodies into spirits, yet only temporarily. His typological archive creates a tempest, a temple of this other reality, which excavates all the world’s pains, psalms, and griefs, yielding to the advantage of the animal and worshiping the dominance of nature.

By recording the amniotic processes and the lives and afterlives of these multifaceted ceremonies, Gkaintatzis’ work looks at (and with) aberrations. Through artistic and thematic decisions, masks, props, scraps, and ruins are seen as animate beings, as entities whose psyche becomes a residence for what would otherwise remain unnoticed.

Ioanna Gerakidi, December 2022