Stefanos Tsivopoulos ARCHIVE CRISIS

Archive Crisis is a visual essay based on a series of previously unpublished images from Greek (media) archives collected by visual artist Stefanos Tsivopoulos. The book explores the mechanisms of visual culture in a mediatized democracy, and their effect on the production of collective memory. Tsivopoulos' multi-layered visual essay - which builds the main body of this book - not only reveals the patterns, idiosyncrasies, textures, and tactility of these images but ultimately inquires the extent to which photographic, archival documents provide us with knowledge. The book's fascinating image material is of a diverse nature and is intrinsically linked to a broader European and global context such as the Cold War, Greek-US relationships, and more recent crisis. Essays from authors provide academic reflection and link these historical images to a broader contemporary context.With contributions by Dimitris Antoniou and Alfredo Cramerotti.At the forefront of Stefanos Tsivopoulos' artistic endeavor is an investigation into mediated reality, with a focus on mass media aesthetics and the historicity of moving image. Concurrent with the artist's fascination with the technology of image runs a continuous research and experimentation with the fine line between reality and its fictional reconstruction, the authentic and the scripted, the fictional and the factual. Tsivopoulos works primarily with film that combines the artist's strong cinematic images with archives and found footage to create a genre that he calls documentary-science fiction. About the artistStefanos Tsivopoulos was born in 1973 in Prague, he lives and works in Amsterdam and New York. He studied fine arts at the Superior Academy in Athens, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam.