Foreword

Images. We produce and perceive an increasingly continuous flow of images. The networks are redefining their use, their economy, their ecology.

Flow. UNLOCKED draws its content from this infinite flow. It makes a selection out of them, a clever layout according to an uninhibited, formal language between beauty, games and styles.

Photography. The hundreds of photographs that constitute UNLOCKED are created by renowned, or less renowned, artists. Often published on social media, they renew the way photography is used today: its production, publication, feedback and community. Photography has emancipated itself from antiquated rules.

Joy. Visual rhymes, coloured constructions, playful visions and the joys of sex, historical hoaxes and pitfalls, all combined to illustrate the body on stage, the ornate body, the body as an ornament. A symptom of an era that has overcome 90’s trash to give way to a more playful and distanced relationship with the body.

Ornament. Vassilis Zidianakis’ vision has contributed to surpassing the modernist puritanism (crime and ornament), in that there is no hierarchy between the idea and its implementation. The ornament becomes the subject as well as the commentary. It attributes existence to what it adorns, as well taking its place. In the same way that clothing, jewellery, a tattoo, the scarification in relation to the body, the landscape in relation to the point of view or the flower in the sexual seduction of plants.

Reversal. UNLOCKED is political because it reverses the order of dominant thinking. It challenges the primacy of conceptual thinking to the advantage of artistic, ritual and formal thinking, placing the analogy in the heart of the creation of the imaginary, poetry in the heart of the construction of the world.

Illuminated manuscript. The images and the layout of UNLOCKED are here in the form of a vast illuminated manuscript, whose text would be our own lives.

Jérôme Delormas
Director of La Gaîté lyrique, Paris