Ileana Tounta, Center of Contemporary Art, Athens, 2007

Organically contemporary with his time, Babousis is a child of utopian architecture, of anti-psychiatry, of the denunciation of bureaucracy, of penitentiary control and of the policing performed by classification and identification; he is a child of Deleuze, of Castoriadis, of Foucault. And just as Foucault sees in the last lines of Words and Things, the end of anthropocentric knowledge coming like a wave that passes over the sand and erases the face of man, so Babousis’ photograph inscribes this movement and specifies it by erasing the outline of the “face” to open up the space of its absence. The photograph now functions as the fact of erasing any face from the rhetoric of staging and the discourse of the choral arrangement.

Denys Zacharopoulos

“To judge means to separate, to discriminate, to distinguish, to compare, to exclude, to decide. Finally, condemn, elect, reward. An activity which is part of the creative process itself. ”
In the section on spaces of judgment, Babousis photographs various spaces of judgment, empty meeting rooms of various kinds from courtrooms, schools, senates, academies, rectorates, boards of trustees, ecclesiastical meetings, to parliament. These images are a record of the decision making centres of institutions, a kind of mapping of a nervous system that in turn forms the basis of a value system based on the dipoles of right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. It is the image of a space in which morality is formally shaped, democracy is expressed, freedom is preserved, and in which human presence is not implied, as in the case of the Volterra psychiatric clinics, but is indicated by the seats, benches and microphones in proportion to the severity of the photographs that will completely de-activate these spaces and cut them off from any possibility of narrative continuity.

Denys Zacharopoulos

“To judge means to separate, to discriminate, to distinguish, to compare, to exclude, to
decide. Finally, condemn, elect, reward. An activity which is part of the creative process
itself. ”
In the section on spaces of judgment, Babousis photographs various spaces of judgment,
empty meeting rooms of various kinds from courtrooms, schools, senates, academies,
rectorates, boards of trustees, ecclesiastical meetings, to parliament. These images are a
record of the decision-making centres of institutions, a kind of mapping of a nervous system
that in turn forms the basis of a value system based on the dipoles of right or wrong, good
or bad, beautiful or ugly. It is the image of a space in which morality is formally shaped,
democracy is expressed, freedom is preserved, and in which human presence is not implied,
as in the case of the Volterra psychiatric clinics, but is indicated by the seats, benches and
microphones in proportion to the severity of the photographs that will completely de-
activate these spaces and cut them off from any possibility of narrative continuity.

Alexios Papazacharias