"Crash Test" is part of "Jumbo Jumbo Jumbo" project, for the 11th studio of painting and expanded media of Athens School of Fine Arts, with professors Vassilis Vlastaras, Kostis Stafylakis and Adonis Stoantzikis.
Crash Test is a collaboration with Evi Zampogianni

It started like that :
 

I re-enacted the crash inside three Jumbo stores.

Evi Zampogianni took all the photos.

Not a phone. Not digital.

Polaroid.

A medium with no copy/paste.

No undo.

One frame, then it’s done.

Against aisles repeating themselves.

Against the plastic loop of "newness."

The cheap-mass-immediate aesthetic.

Walter Benjamin said it:

art loses its aura when it goes into reproduction mode.

But what happens when everything around you is already a copy?

When the original is the packaging?

When reproduction becomes an aesthetic choice?

Here, the Polaroid isn’t vintage.

It’s a bug.

A tiny act of refusal.

It doesn’t refresh.

It doesn’t upload to the cloud.

It can’t be deleted.

What’s taken is taken.

An image that happens once, like the crash itself.

No replay.

No user manual.

No room in the feed.

And that’s the point.

The accident :
 

The phrase “What time cannot bring, a Porsche can deliver” was confirmed in the most… high-octane way one quiet Sunday afternoon, when a Porsche decided to accelerate not just in speed, but in storyline.

It was a peaceful day at the 83rd kilometer of the Athens–Lamia national highway — until a trail of fire and airborne car parts from a Honda and a Porsche teamed up to create an adrenaline explosion that even Hollywood would hesitate to film.

Behind the wheel of the Porsche: a 24-year-old speed enthusiast and heir to the most colorful capitalist dream — the Jumbo toy empire. Next to him, a friend, advisor, co-pilot, and probably a Google Maps subscriber, who simply didn’t have time that day to say, “maybe slow down a bit.”

The setting? A parking lot that never hurt anyone, yet ended up as the stage for a motorized tragedy. The soundtrack? The screech of twisted metal, the roar of fire, and the cries of a father who just wanted a quick bathroom break — only to walk out into a full-blown apocalypse.

From the wreckage, nothing was spared — except a surreal scene that looked less like reality and more like an over-the-top action movie teaser. 

“Evacuate the area! The Porsche is overheating!”

In real life, the credits roll far too suddenly.
 

An accident is how you enter.

an accident is how you exit.

(you’re basically a pop-up ad that no one clicked on,

but here you are.)

birth was a glitch.

death is just a forced shutdown.

in between:

lag. buffering. system errors.

scroll. like. refresh.

an accident isn’t the exception.

it’s the system revealing itself.

the moment the code says too much.

the moment reality unschedules itself.

we fetishize control

but we’re all just running

beta versions of ourselves.

your body?

an unstable interface.

your memory?

corrupted archive.

your love life?

accident in autoplay.

maybe the only non-accident

is the fact that we still think

we’re supposed to be here.

 

speed / glue / memory / baudelairian flash

 

Time isn’t linear.

it’s a crack.

a flash.

something that passes right by you

and if you don’t catch it — it’s gone.

Baudelaire knew that.

there’s no continuity.

just a moment that explodes

then silence.

the speed of the crash

was poetry without meaning

just sound, glass, metal

a moment so loud it erased memory.

the speed of "take the polaroid now, before they kick us out of Jumbo"

the point wasn’t to preserve

it was to burn it into the flash.

not an image — an intensity.

the speed of the glue gun

before it cooled to build a car out of factory boxes

before it lost its shape

before the form disappeared

your hand had to choose

without thinking 

the speed of fire

when we lit the first car

there was no regrowth

just combustion

and then nothing.

the speed of the end

when we’ll destroy the second car

we won’t plan it

we’ll just do it.

a gesture.

a body-written poem.

but

the polaroids stay.

not as memory

as afterimages of a moment

like they’re saying: “we were here, briefly, and that was enough.”

nothing lasts

but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

the flame existed

even for a second.

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                                                            Zavelakinomen

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Zavelakinomen was discovered deep inside the Jumbo Swamp.

It had been living there for decades — since the early 1800s —

in what would later become the foundation of a Jumbo megastore.

This is all that’s left of its skeleton.

Distorted. Faded. Almost memeified.

The last of its kind.

Its ultra-toxic tentacles were so overpowered,

it accidentally wiped out all of its own offspring.

Species: self-deleted.

Final extinction via biological glitch.

In an era where reproduction is a factory setting,

where everything is made to be duplicated, stored, shipped,

Zavelakinomen radiates something rare,

a ghostly aura of singularity, error, and ancient drag.

You can’t restock it.

You can’t clone it.

It doesn’t exist in SKU form.

It’s what Benjamin might call "aura" 

but filtered through post-capitalist sadness and surreal nostalgia.

A kind of sacred obsolete.

Extinct means: unfiltered.

Mysterious means: no download available.

Glorious means: never mass-produced.

A glitch that survived the system

by crashing it.