What kind of landscapes do the inmates view, when their gaze extends beyond the barded-wine fence? What kind of occupations and land uses prosper in the places where society executes the prison sentence? How does the inside silently converse with the outside? How does a rigid boundary give meaning to every path or muddy road around it? And how much pressure is exerted on both sides of such a boundary when the prison is in a residential area? In this, internationally original, project Yiannis Pantelidis approach the external boundaries of detention facilities. Between 2016 and 2018, with the permission of the Greek Ministry of Justice, he visited eighteen detention facilities across the country, exploring the zone between prison and its surroundings. His photographs eloquently feature the neutral zone, a gray zone, a zone that promises nothing to no one. A naked land of railings, cables, metal panels, icy soil and cement.

Yiannis Pantelidis is proposing a consideration of the landscape stretching beyond the city and depending on it, by selecting as the arena of his photographic quest for the past five years, this very same territory in his native city, Thessaloniki. His aim seemed fascinatingly vague, from the very beginning: to feel for an invisible boundary, the field where city and nature penetrate each other, accomplishing both wins and defeats; the human ones being ofter more apparent, but not necessarily longer. The sites where he wandered as a flâneur, often reveal elements of abandoment or low degree of organization, since property right are still practiced there; however the nuclear powers keeping them in track are weaker. Nothing goes unnoticed: every broken twig, road patch, stepped upon bunch of grass, every dotted i and crossed t of the landscape is captured in this topographic approach with the quiet, meticulous gathering of information. Some photographs are almost monochromatic studies, the color seeming strangely drained, while others let themselves indulge in the charm of vivid saturation. Similarly, despite his keeping of distance, he attempts to bring things closer through the manipulation of composition, the delicate arrangement of elements to visibility, the often smooth succession of planes comprising a scene. In this sober formalism everything is correlated, balanced by the accuracy scale of gaze.

Ano Poli constitutes an area with a topography as layered as its past: it is, at the same time, a hub with important byzantine monuments, an old Turkish mahalle, the place where 1922 refugees set roots, an amphitheatrical “balcony” of the city towards the open sea front, a folk neighborhood with yards and human relationships, a field where ambitious modern architecture rises next to the sober simplicity of the anonymous one. The photographers of this year’s walk wandered in the micro-neighbourhoods of Ano Poli, each one almost with its own internal temperature. Yiannis Pantelidis focused on the perimeter of the area tracing its boundaries, geographical and historical, as evident by the sacs at the Eptapyrgio clearing where the bodies of executed prisoners used to be piled up, the neighboring Christian cemeteries (Orthodox, Armenian, Protestant), the fences of which carve solid boundaries even in the vicinity of death. The refurbishment scaffolding recalls the occupation sieges against the enclosed city, as opposed to the contemporary urban web expanding all over. Pantelidis also attempts studies on a more modest scale, such as the dampened deserted room or the steps stumbling upon a wall, an implicit indication of a dead-end.