PENDULUM
“The Pendulum book is the approach of a return journey to the city of L’Aquila in central Italy. My relationship with this place started 12 years before I was born, when my parents met each other accidentaly there. I grew up listening to their narrations about this city, I visited it with them as a child, and I molded their story in my mind. I moved there, only a few years after the earthquake, in order to work as an architect in the reconstruction of the city, but in reality it was a return to my fictitious roots. During my stay, I experienced the post-seismic terrain in a very bizarre way. The sense of familiarity I had developed in my fainted childhood memory collided with the uncanny new condition the city was in.”
The natural disaster caused a violent change at the body and the life of this place and led to the displacement of its citizens towards the suburbs. The heart of the historical center, where I lived, was left empty and a strange silence prevailed in the narrow streets. L’Aquila was a pass-through in a transitional period of my life, a temporary pause in a place that reminded a non-place. I experienced this pause as an oscillation in the air. The quake’s resonance created a rupture in my mind. I tried to heal this rupture by capturing photographically its imprints and its aftermath, as a process of re-writing this place in my memory, as a personal quest to restore a relationship. However, I left L’Aquila before its reconstruction was completed.
The pendulum’s movement was interrupted, the oscillation stopped; it stayed unfinished.
Stefania Orfanidou was born in 1989. She is an architect and a photographer currently living and working in Athens, Greece. She has lived in Kavala, Thessaloniki, Madrid, Rotterdam and L’Aquila. Since January 2019 she is co-founder of the multidisciplinary studio CHORA – Creative Hub of Radical Architecture. Her photographic work has been featured in magazines, galleries and festivals in Greece and abroad.
February 2019
Athens, Greece
Self-Published
Edition of 200
Hardcover
19 x 28 cm
96 pages
44 color images
Handmade binding
Offset printing
Texts: Stefania Orfanidou, Panos Bourlessas
Language: English, Italian
Graphic design: Charis Karantzas, Stefania Orfanidou
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website: Stefania Orfanidou
Instagram: stefania.orfanidou
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copyright © Stefania Orfanidou, all rights reserved
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