2018 Contenders

Title: “Goner”
 
Story: Olivia Thanasoula – Hugo Varvoglis
 
Performer: Olivia Thanasoula
 
Music, camera, montage: Hugo Varvoglis
 

Description: This video is a videodance project, made for the Raise Your Voice festival in Greece, regarding Human Trafficking.

The woman in the video starts by wearing a work uniform, thus entering a «role» from which she expects to take advantage and free herself of poverty and other unpleasant difficulties. As time goes by, she realises that this uniform becomes a second skin and every desperate attempt to pull it away from her body is falling to failure. She is stuck in a place alone, frightened and being exploited by other human beings. The only way out is to escape and run away to the city…

Human trafficking is about humans exploiting humans… How is this even possible?

Goner. Nobody searches for he who is gone, who has no luck, no future.

Artist: ALEXANDRA APSOKARDOU, ARTEMIS ARVANITI APSOKARDOU
 
Title: “FORCED ILLUSION”
  
Description: The artistic installation with the title FORCED ILLUSION is consisted of a central element, the garment, around which with the use of photography and drawing a scenery is created with white colour to dominate, giving a peaceful first impression. What happens though when the pure changes form and humans acquire animal behavior which originates from the instinct of survival, arrogance and greed for money and material goods?
 
The environment of the visual installation is structured so that it constitutes a field of questioning on the exploitation and trafficking of people, especially the trade of human organs.
 
Each element of the work works allegorically to express the commodification of life, the indifference for our fellow man and the lack of morality.
Artist:  GEORGE KALIVIS
 
Title: “sales”
 
Description: GR // «Beware of the plastic bags and covers. A child could suffocate by wrapping one on its head.», says the Encyclopedia of Women (Aldus Books Limited, 1972, p. 93). The accompanying illustrative sketch of this advice to the mothers of a seemingly safe modern western society is transformed: a child in a bag, a child with a wrapper, a child for sale (?) What we thought to be an alien slave-market becomes another clearly familiar everyday supermarket. Behind fancy consumer wrappers, human bodies are often exploitable objects with exchange value. “Humans-Things” that bear prices commensurate with the profit of their owners – 40 million people live as modern slaves, over 1 million people in Europe, 1 out of 4 are children.
Artist: PANAGIOTOU VIVI
 
Title: “sad -witch”
 
Description: Trafficking in human beings means the trafficking and trafficking of people, usually for the purpose of sexual slavery, forced labor or sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others.
  

The man in his endeavour to survive can suffer everything and to face this stressful state survives through the “defensive mechanism”…

  
“Refusal: the individual denies an unpleasant or undesirable part of his reality.
  
He denies a bit of his reality, he makes a world that is not real, a
world where the witch can not do anything and regrets …
Artist: ALEX POP
 
Title: “The Unwanted”
 
Description: The darkness of the painting depicts the life of the people who suffer from Human Slavery. The butterfly, the music notes and  other hidden clues, symbolise their  soul that tries to stay sane and well, in spite of the Dead End.
Artist: JOSEF FADEL SIMON
 
Title: “Timeless Tyranny”
 
Description: A landscape of slavery, where the masters of time are managing your existence from the beginning till the end.
Artist: KATERINA CHRISTOPOULOU
 
Title: “Girl”
 
Description: This refugee girl, reveals a contradiction to me, through her gaze. Her need to trust me and at the same time her refusal and fear of doing so. Every time I look at her portrait, I find it hard to avoid the thought that the distrust for people might be for her the best option.
Artist: EKATERINI DIAMANTI
 
Title: “Personifications of exploitation”
 
Description: In the artwork there is a complex of forms consisting of the personifications of the exploitation of the nature of human, of freedom and of slavery-prostitution. It is a perceptual work consisting of forms such as the personification of the nature of the human who fights with the other people with the same nature {even they are both people who deserve respect as they should} and only the children which are the two little figures find all this situation wrong and try to prevent it.Next to them is the personalization of liberty that wants to be free, to throw away the chains, but they don’t let her.Last,but not least there is the form of “slavery-prostitution” where a strong man with muscles “step” on helpless creatures like women that he finds it in his way.With this way i want to express how unfair and wrong are these thoughts. The gold and the way that i handmade create the forms want to show the timelessness of this status from ancinet past until now.
Artist: NELLIE VERGOPOULOU
 
Title: “IN BETWEEN. TIME & SPACE”
 

Description: The Fashion Industry is one of the biggest supporters of modern slavery across the globe, responsible for the enslavement of millions of people. Miserable working and living conditions, meager or almost nonexistent salaries, small children victims of the trafficking of cheap labor, impoverishment of humanity, all at the altar of profit.

The West is turning a blind eye and draining and reaping whole countries. “Fields” of humans with a bloody harvest of pain and saffering. Scarecrows frightening and detestable protecting a “dirty” glamour.

I chose to “project” through a creation of mine, with the title “IN BETWEEN. TIME&SPACE”, from my collection “URBAN NARRATIONS” this social problem . For this reason this creation is presented dressing a scarecrow. Behind every clothe is a human being, from the conception of an idea to the actual making of the piece. Fashion can carry messages . Behind the gramour and spotlights of Fashion you can disover a sustainable label or a shadowy industry of exploitation of human beings.

Artist: ANGELIKI BARAS
 
Title: “Petite Cinderella : The factory’s little princess”
 

Description: This piece presents allegorically the phenomenon of child trafficking, the purpose of which is the coercive work or other unfair purposes.

Many girls, at a small age, want to become a princess or to play with their dolls, but some of them do not have the right to own toys ,but also they do not have the right of childhood. “Petit Cinderella” or “the factory’s little princess” is every little girl who is forced to work hard and forget that she is just a child. She is the princess , who doesn’t wear beautiful dresses, but rags.You can find her in the streets, tired and dirty, holding a broken toy. Although, this installation shows, what can be hidden inside the princess’ soul. The paper dress depicts the dreams and the memories of her which she “takes off” like a dress, in order to work in the inhospitable space, called factory.

Petit Cinderella” can be any child , of any sex , in any country. 

Artist: DESPINA KILAKOU
 
Title: “Your suffering – My pleasure…”
 

Description: A sculpture dress made entirely of boning. A modern corset – prison cell that traps the human body not for beautification but for sexual intercourse. Main inspiration are the transcendental aesthetic values, the female world with the burden of sexuality, the sensuality, the erotic and human form in volume and silhouette. With black as dominant color, artistic movements, subcultures and bondage techniques are blend together, creating an imposing, strange figure, designed to challenge and awake the viewer on issues such as female exploitation and human trafficking.

Artist: Ioannis Mousoulis
 
Title: What if the great powers of society were not being blind to reality.”
 

Description: Behind closed doors of what consists of the great powers of a society, men of authority only seek profit. This way they expand the issue of modern day slavery while they could have been fighting it instead.

The drawing depicts one of those men of authority trying to lure in a young girl so he can abduct her. This act is happening right in front of the big powers of society: Church, Government, Police

Artist: Marina Yele
 
Title: “Pleasant Dreams”
 

Description: In a victims life, a dreamcatcher would eliminate all bad dreams and just keep the pleasant ones.