Palamas Reframed

Palamas Reframed is a photographic series developed from on-site documentation of flooded homes in Palamas, Greece, following Storm Daniel in September 2023, the most costly environmental disaster in Greece’s recorded history. When the water receded, domestic interiors were forcibly displaced into public space. Furniture, appliances, children’s desks, and personal photographs were removed from homes and left exposed on the streets. These involuntarily revealed fragments form the material basis of the work. The series is constructed through a process of photographic collage and photomontage. Lorentzou photographs these displaced domestic elements in situ and digitally reconstructs them into composite architectural images. Each image is assembled exclusively from real, photographed fragments and organised through a controlled spatial logic that maintains architectural plausibility. At the same time, fractures, inconsistencies, and traces of damage are deliberately preserved. The resulting structures appear inhabitable yet unstable, occupying a space between realism and collapse. In Palamas Reframed, photomontage functions as a critical method rather than a stylistic device. By reordering domestic fragments with a logic reminiscent of a dollhouse, the work exposes the tension between control and vulnerability embedded in post-disaster environments. This approach reflects the cosmetic nature of many institutional recovery strategies directed toward rural and lower-income communities, where damage is often addressed visually rather than through structural or systemic change. The reconstructed interiors collapse distinctions between inside and outside, private and public, individual and collective. Bedrooms, kitchens, courtyards, and exterior domestic spaces from different households are combined into shared architectural formations. In doing so, the series refuses to isolate disaster as a private experience and instead positions it as a collective condition shaped by environmental collapse, social inequality, and infrastructural failure. Rather than presenting disaster as spectacle or offering images of resolution, Palamas Reframed interrogates how recovery is framed, organised, and made acceptable through visual systems. Through photographic construction, the work questions whose experiences are rendered visible, how narratives of resilience are produced, and how inequality is normalised within images of repair.