The Demand records the sudden, unforeseen entry of two people in a new, eerie state of being – one they share but that neither of them quite understands. Are they falling in love? Are they scared of the accelerated change around them? Why did they meet while the world is rumoured to end? What should they do with each other in these circumstances? “What are our demands?”, they scribble on pieces of paper as if the future must exist for them. Shot in Athens, a South-European capital that had already experienced the 21^st century as a procession of crises, the photographic series The Demand narrates the entanglement of two human lives as the city was slipping into the Covid-related quarantine in 2020. The photographs deliver the gradual withdrawal of the two protagonists’ psyche from the materiality of public space, the immobility imposed on all relationships, the inevitability of transgressing the law, and their realisation that they are confronted with immense power structures. Drawing on the sense of alienation that the pandemic generated in 2020, The Demand explores a state of being that remains unnarratable – one essentially suspended between the personal and the universal.

Text: Angela Dimitrakaki