Slought is pleased to announce "Open Archive," a public workshop with Depression Era, a collective lens-based arts project based in Athens, Greece, on Wednesday, January 23, 2019 from 10am-12pm. The workshop will be facilitated by members Yiannis Hadjiaslanis, Yorgos Prinos, and Georges Salameh, and has been organized in conjunction with "Photography in Crisis," a retrospective exhibition of the work of Depression Era that engages the so-called "Greek crisis" and its aftermath, on display January 17 – February 17, 2019.

The Depression Era project seeks to inhabit the urban and social landscapes of the crisis. It begins as a collective experiment – bringing together artists, photographers, writers, curators – that, picturing the Greek city and its outer regions, the private lives of outcasts, the emergence of the Commons and snapshots of everyday life that often remain unnoticed, seeks to understand, as clearly as possible, the social, economic, and historical changes currently taking place in Greece. The works produced by the collective constitute an "anarchic" archive (i.e. without governing structure or institutional framework) of the Greek social landscape since the financial crisis of 2011, when the group first began, and perhaps of the European landscape too.

The collective's name takes its point of departure from the sense that entropy, disaster, uncertainty, and insolvency are states of mind, and that we are being ushered into an era in which notions of progress, ideas of growth, and the reflex of looking forward to a better future are no longer viable modes for perceiving and creating in the world. After eight years of existence, the Depression Era project now seeks to reflect on all the images, texts, photographs, videos, and discussions and representations of internal and external crises that the collective has produced. The task is to re-edit – to unarchive – the corpus of all the documents previously created and collected by Depression Era.