Larissa From the series Neutral Zone, 2016-2018

To create the unpublished series Neutral Zone, Yiannis Pantelidis obtained a special licence to visit eighteen prisons all across Greece, in order to study the zone separating the condition of confinement from the surrounding atmosphere. What kind of landscapes surround a prison? What kind of occupations and land uses develop around it? How is it a rigid limit makes meaningful each single path, light opening, or muddy road around it? And how much pressure is exercised on this kind of limit from both sides, when the prison is located in an inhabited area? Pantelidis makes us confront limits unknown to us, heterotopias sown in the entrails of the Greek landscape, places refusing to become familiar even to those living or working next to them. But how many more places are also unfamiliar to us? Do prison walls serve as an airtight barrier effectively keeping the world of freedom and confinement apart? Could it be that for many people, enchained as they are in financial, family, social and other adversities, the division becomes somewhat blurred?