“Photography Will Kill You”, my mother told me after I was attacked, injured and left without my equipment during a mugging incident in my hometown Athens last year. That sentence became the embodiment of my struggle: not merely a warning but a reality; a quiet truth that to make art is to always step into a state of perpetual disequilibrium.

Through my migration between two continents following my PhD, and in countless conversations with artists and thinkers worldwide, I found myself circling back to this absurd condition stretched across time and place reflecting upon a conflict that belongs to every age. This project did not arise from inquiry but from recognition —the absurd grace of continuing to create in the vanity of all that crushes us; a form of Sisyphean labour.

Sisyphus, a king in Greek mythology, was condemned by the gods to an eternal punishment of rolling a massive boulder up a hill only for it to tumble back down each time it neared the top.

In the work of French writer Maurice Blanchot, this image transforms into a metaphor for artistry itself, where the creator becomes “a hero of insane torment,” pushing the translucent weight of vision uphill, not toward a summit, but toward the affirmation of the gesture itself.

As a Blanchotian reader, I return to this reimagining of the myth of Sisyphus, native to my Greek heritage, as a figure of worklessness: condemned to an infinite gesture, a task that resists completion yet insists on being performed.

Each image meditates on the invisible labour of making, the burden of being (un)seen and the sacred absurdity of continuing anyway. Blanchot’s notion of “unworking”, the labour that undoes itself and gestures without end, haunts the series, further reflecting on the artist’s recognition that the burden of creation is inseparable from its futility.

Yet the work is more about the dignity of futility, about the artist who builds, erases and builds again, not for recognition but because the gesture itself is sacred.

Conceived through layering and re-inscribing fragmented depictions of Sisyphus onto my own photographs of solitary boulders in the desert, captured during meditative walks under shifting light and intervals of night, the thirteen mixed media works mark nine years of labouring within my art practice.

Reworked with charcoal, a medium of both intensity and erasure, they embody my notion of the unfinished: to build, to blur and to begin again. In this process, the act of fragmenting and re-composing becomes a form of deciphering; a looping gesture that embraces the necessary failure inherent in making.

All artworks are unique editions: Mixed media combining analogue photographs, collage processes, pastel, charcoal, etching paper

Artwork titles in order of appearance:

I know the climb never ends, 2025

I am caught in that “emerging artist” label, like the rock won’t budge, 2025

The moon watches the climb, 2025

But I am stuck in the climb, wondering if any of this really matters, 2025

The summit fades, the gesture persits, 2025

The moon carries the same weight; its burden turns into light, 2025

Gravity knows the endless gesture, 2025

The weight rests in my hands, 2025

I wanna ride the wave, even if it crashes back down, 2025

The climb is futile, the rock knows, 2025

Under the moon, the rock waits, 2025

For now, I wait for my turn, still pushing forward, 2025

A glow that refuses to settle, 2025