These pictures are the product of my last two-year wandering in several places and areas of Attica (Greece), the zone between the city edges and the countryside. Edgelands depicts vague, ambiguous and constantly-changing landscapes that people often reject as being ugly or aesthetically unworthy.
This time I escaped the Athens city centre, the chaos, the perpetual mobility of the crowd; this time I turned my eyes to the edges of the city, where the spectacular and eye-catching frame tend to fade and disappear into the hazy and disordered flora. I ran off the main highway and followed much more peripheral roads — an uncharted road network, stretched like a web in the Attica basin, which indiscreetly unites underpopulated areas, industrial zones and slums. These are the narrow and insignificant roads we take when we’ve lost our way; these are the in-between areas which constitute the passageway from the city to the countryside.
All in all, my nocturnal wanderings in these places — so close to Athens but still so distant — revive the question of what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is significant and what is trivial — but most importantly where the heart of the city beats hard and unceasingly.
— Babis Kougemitros, Athens, Greece
