During the Eurogroup emergency meeting in Brussels on July 7, 2015, newly appointed Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos posed for photographs, with his notes visible to the cameras.
In these photos Tsakalotos is depicted shaking hands with Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem, wearing a crumpled light grey cotton suit, without a tie, and holding his notes written in English on hotel stationery. In a critical moment in Greece’s debt crisis and two days after a bailout referendum in which the
majority of Greeks rejected the creditors’ austerity terms, the Greek finance minister’s personal notes set off a brief wave of speculation on social media. Various close-up details from the notes were circulated on the internet, as commentators attempted to decode their meaning. On that day Tsakalotos had 20,129 mentions on social media. The word ‘notes’ was at the center
of social media conversations, surpassing 3,000 mentions.
“I won’t hide the fact that I am nervous and anxious. I’m not assuming this position at the easiest moment in Greek history”, Tsakalotos had said a day before in a press conference, after assuming the post of Minister of Finance. The works consists of a series of images showing all the different cropped versions of Tsakalotos’s notes, found on the internet, a list of the words recognised in them, and a timeline recording Tsakalotos’s activity during that day. The order of the images is organized according to Tsakalotos’s thumb position, producing a sequence of images that follows the scene from left to right, while the list of the words is organized alphabetically.