The works of these three years are rooted in my thoughts and anger about power structures, the construction and performance of gender roles, the suppression of any attempt to move away from them, and the need for survival, contact and sensuality within these conditions. The archival photographs that were the raw material for the works symbolize or reflect an aspect of reality that I cannot pass over and somehow have to manage. Zombies, porn, fruit from commercials, diamond mine, gold mine, desert, dumpster diving, a great bodybuilder, the socialist father of the mall, fembot (“female” robot), screaming flowers, flower-pot, ASMR online care, TV screens, Oppenheimer and Mr. a.: close to the logic of collage, I chopped up the original photos to assemble them like simple Frankensteins that each only needed two corpses. It’s a practical way of thinking around the sources and the emotions they carry. So I have the feeling or illusion of making them my own and through this process I alter them, reveal them in a different light, maybe poke holes in them that go in other directions, maybe make something beautiful out of something ugly, or show something beautiful in the ugly by focusing in a different way.

The general title, which was decided upon after first completing the series, and discussing their sources and my previous work, places the hybrid landscapes and creatures of the drawings within the environment of commercialization and apparent safety, comfort and disenchantment. Supermarkets and malls: ideal settings for Zombie films. Despite their sources and the stories and information they carry, my aim was for the works to communicate or convey to the senses something deeper and independent of the thoughts and interpretations that the original images were capable of. They make a story on their own, from the shapes, sensations of the landscapes, poses and gestures without any further information in relation to their origins.

Myrto Stampoulou

*Excerpt from Myrto Stampoulou’s interview at avmag.gr, 2020.