Kuebiko, Evangelos Daskalakis

Evangelos Daskalakis' Kuebiko rises from the experience of the pandemic and captures the mnemonic trace of an Apocalypse. It is an ominous travelogue through a black and white urban landscape, almost void of life, basically in darkness. The city's empty streets are overtaken by the police and the army imposing curfew and control over the bodies of the Others. Employees in masks, even oxygen masks, in medical jumpsuits - faceless - patrol in large vehicles, and with their electronic thermometers in hand, sometimes with weapons. Daskalakis transforms his photographic documentation of a historical event into a graphic novel with cyberpunk elements, into a storyboard for a film noir, an eschatological prophecy about the future of humanity. The dystopia we are faced with permeates the pores of this book and those of its readers-spectators, awakening a very familiar nightmare: that of a withering world, drained by us. In Japanese mythology, the spirit "Kuebiko" symbolizes knowledge, and is depicted by a scarecrow: a motionless observer. Likewise, photography captures the world in stillness, bearing a dense meaning, a silent message. After all, the scarecrow can be a reflection of us humans. In the age of the Anthropocene and of technocapitalism, we are more immobilized than ever, passive observers of the terrifying ecological and political condition we live in. In the end, one wonders whether Kuebiko is a depiction of something past, a realistic projection of an inevitable future ahead of us, or a History whose next chapters we are called upon to write. - Pasqua Vorgia

Published by: Shelf-published in collaboration with ZOETROPE ATHENS
Edition of 404
Softcover
64 pages
145 x 200 mm
ISBN 9786180041538