Stranger Than Paradise
by Irina Vosgerau
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2025', 2025
Category: People and Communities
A rough mountain region in Greece. The locals, living with their own rules of community, surviving with an inalienable nature, some of them never having left, some returning from the alienated life of the cities. And we from the cities, with our roots in the life of the countryside, from which we are both trying to escape and to hold on to its values. Dis-rootedness and a return to our future. The non-humans, the secrets of the mountain landscape itself, the animal farm, the hard work, the tenderness, the communication of men and of women, and their playful setting-of-borders. The in-between, the unknown, the fear, the learning, the tenderness, the safety which the small community provides - however temporary. The feeling of belonging that is rooted in the deepest layers of the human being and that pulls us towards each other until our "foreignness" separates us again.