Hangar Photo Art Center, one of Europe’s most beautiful venues dedicated to the visual arts, has always felt homy. It’s a convivial space, where artists meet and easily strike up conversations, and where photographers really appreciate being exhibited. This is thanks to the warm welcome they receive from Director Delphine Dumont and her team, and their commitment.
The planet is the common denominator of the images featured at Hangar. The Melting Islands project highlights the challenges faced by several islands: the melting away of the populations, of ice, of sandy coastlines.
Clément Chapillon focuses on the lives of the inhabitants of the arid island of Amorgos, the least populated island in Greece, which he has been visiting regularly for the past twenty years. “This island exerts a magnetic attraction,” says the photographer. “It’s the poorest and the wildest. It has a fascinating history. There are roughly 1,000 people left in an immense territory that has been completely depopulated. It’s a sort of absolute island, the end of the world.” The diehards include Alain, a Frenchman from Bagnols de Bigorre. He came to Amorgos some thirty years ago, and has never left. “This is both an Eden and a prison.”
There’s also a young Greek woman, Plato, born on the island, who in one of the photos is preparing fava, a chickpea purée, and is bored to death, especially in winter. Or yet Carolina, an English writer who has come to lose herself in a village deep in the mountains. “When I photographed her, she was eighty-five years old. The very day I wanted to give her the print, she had died.”