It was shortly after the new millennium. We were at a film festival in Athens, Greece, with some friends, waiting for the short films section to start. There was some time to waste and as was usual we were discussing our ideas for the movie we were soon going to shoot. We were very excited as we were confident that the script we had would make for a great film. The lights went out and two hours of some amazing and more mediocre movies played on. It was the next to last short that ruined the whole evening for us. It was a 5 minute experimental film and to our dismay the premise was exactly the same as our idea. My friends and I were devastated. The idea was not novel anymore, and people would be accusing us of stealing it from someone else that had already done it. We never made that film together- or any film to be honest.

Fast forward to 2016. It’s been a few months since I returned to Europe from my Fulbright Artist Fellowship at CalArts in California. Antonis and I are having a coffee and discussing our experiences from our time the States – he did the same fellowship a year before me in New York. The more we talked, the more we were amazed about all the cliches that we encountered by chance, but also about how many more of them we were actively chasing on our own. We shared an almost identical view of the place and of our time there. Yet, it was impressive to see how differently we interpreted the whole thing and how we held a heterogenous approach to narrative and image making.  In the end we decided to make an exhibition together. It was hosted in CAN Gallery, Athens and a few more artists were invited to participate. In contrast to my younger self, I was genuinely excited and intrigued with seeing works by people that were in a way ‘competing’ with mine. Not to mention that in the exchanges we had, probing and testing each other against our theory and praxis both projects ended up being much more than what they were when we first found out that we worked on similar themes.

Antonis Theodoridis is a photographer from Drama, Greece. He studied Digital Media at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and currently is finishing his MFA at the University of Hartford, CT. His new series Ways of Escape (2017) which is a work in progress is shot in Athens, and I’m beyond intrigued and waiting to see the final outcome.