Welcome to Korallipress.com by Georgia Konsta-Antonopoulou (hopefully featuring other artists in the future!).
koralli press is a new project born out of the 2020 pandemic. The story of how it was conceived is not unique. Like so many others in the arts, I saw my work disappear overnight in March of 2020.
For many years, I worked as a freelance retoucher out of London, Athens, and most recently in Boston, making other photographers’ images look beautiful. Meanwhile, I continued to shoot - cityscapes, island vistas, portraits - accumulating photos in my hard drive that I hoped to one day sort through.
The pain and uncertainty of the pandemic has given me the time to finally go through my images, but more importantly, it has pushed me to take an artistic risk and be vulnerable in a way that I never had to be as a retoucher. I hope you enjoy the images and products I’ve released as a beginning. God-willing there will be many more to come.
What is in a name? “koralli”
Coming up with a name to describe my new project was not easy. After brainstorming what felt like thousands of words and sounds, I realized that the names that kept surfacing were related to the sea. This was perhaps not surprising given my love for the sea and my parents’ place of birth - the beautiful Greek island of Samos.
It was in a casual conversation with my parents that the name koralli first came up. When I asked them to come up with names they liked, my mother suggested “votsalaki” - which translates to pebble but really means the smooth stones that one finds by the seashore. My dad then shouted, “koralli!”
This name stuck. Koralli means “coral” and its significance is not only its relation to the sea. Coral reefs start small but then they build up into complex, windy, connected ecosystems, like some of the cities closest to my heart - New York, London, and Athens. The density of these cities and the life in them is part of what inspires me, just as much as the peaceful blue of the Aegean Sea.
But Koralli is also an apt metaphor for this project. Part of my idea was to start a brand that features not just my own work, but becomes a platform for other artists to share theirs. Koralli is an organism that is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Coral reefs are giant underwater cities, comprised of the simplest organisms alive, yet they are vital to our global ecosystem, home to many other organisms, and magnificently beautiful, despite their disorganized and decentralized nature.
The koralli colony starts today.
/gk
