Event Category: Visual Arts / Performance

Anaskafi / Excavation

“ANASKAFI / EXCAVATION” is an original site-specific performance and in situ art installation that transforms the Archaeological Museum of Aigio into a space of experiential inquiry. Starting from the transition from the Church of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary to the permanent exhibition, the work is organized as a journey from surface to depth: procession, entrance, observation, excavation, documentation, exhibition.

At the core of the performance lies the parallel between the stratigraphy of the ground and the stratigraphy of human memory. Through a staged monologue, the work enters into dialogue with the exhibits and with the art installation of the “Excavation Pit”, highlighting the fragment as an active document of wear, loss, endurance, and care. The performance proposes an initiation into attention, where historical memory, body, and shared experience meet before the human trace.

AKROVOLISTES

The AKROVOLISTES project focuses on the historical presence of the Senegalese Riflemen (Tirailleurs Sénégalais) in Florina during the First World War. The project aims to offer a poetic interpretation of the experiences of the young soldiers who were forcibly recruited from West Africa and sent to the Balkans to serve on the front lines, while tracing their journey alongside the historical events that shaped the cultural past, present, and future of the local populations of Macedonia.

Curated by Christina Petkopoulou, the exhibition and its public programme seek to create a space for memory and reflection through a series of newly commissioned works. These include a photographic series, a collection of archival interventions and archival installations by visual artist and photographer Giannis Chatziaslanis, a sound performance by visual artist Maria Sideri in collaboration with musician Antonis Kostopoulos, and educational theatre workshops led by theatre educator Chara Lioliou.

Sea of Memory: Engraved Soundscapes

VISUAL ART EXHIBITION
A group interactive exhibition of printmaking works combined with original soundscape viewing paths, centered on the sea as memory, creating a dialogue between classical references and contemporary experimental approaches within the museum environment.

MUSICAL PERFORMANCE AND DANCE
A ritualistic musical experience in which the ancient Greek lyre merges with live soundscapes, female voices, poetry and dance. The musical journey begins with the Odyssey, navigates through emblematic traditional songs and arrives at contemporary musical compositions. The performance culminates in dance inspired by archaic iconography creating a vivid narrative setting.

Magic Lantern

The Magic Lantern is a site-specific visual and sound installation inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the history of early optical devices. Within the vaulted space of the St. George Bastion, light and shadow activate a series of simple projection mechanisms and handcrafted forms, exploring representation as a process through which the world is constructed via images and systems of depiction. Shadows are transformed through movement and spatial arrangement, creating an open-ended narrative that unfolds over time.

Through symbols and codes, the image functions as an active mechanism that both produces and distorts reality. Systems of representation are exposed and deconstructed, revealing the conventions upon which they are built. The installation is complemented by live sound performances, forming a unified multisensory environment in which image and sound coexist and interact in real time.

Karst Dreams

Focusing on dreamlike states as fields of interface between nature and our fellow humans, Karst Dreams invites the audience into a mindful presence, proposing a return to care, community, and the environment as the ultimate expression of our shared humanity. The project activates different points within the archaeological site and the wider landscape.

The performance by Angelo Plessas resonates with karstic, subterranean topographies and calls for a participatory ritual around a conduit that functions as an interface. Through seated circles, sounds, and guided meditation, the language of digital culture is transformed into a poetic tool that makes the economy of attention perceptible.

Meanwhile, in the broader archaeological site, Lydia Delikoura presents installations composed of fragments of her visual vocabulary, placed in direct relation to the landscape as site-specific interventions within a land art framework. As part of the exhibition, an educational program will also take place, designed according to the principles of land art and forest pedagogies.

Descent

The visual performance Descent initiates a process of self-understanding through a post-anthropocentric perspective, in which human existence is conceived as part of a network of interspecies relationships. These symbiotic structures are neither stable nor balanced; rather, they are shaped by asymmetries, dependencies, and continuous transformations.

The work invites audiences to participate in a collective experience of descent through unseen geological layers, entering a liminal field of experience where social and perceptual conditions become destabilized. It unfolds as a ritual of unlearning, a sequence of unexpected encounters—or confrontations—with the ground, materiality, and non-human forms of life. What would it mean to care for the planet if doing so required the invention of radically new ways of listening, perceiving, and coexisting?

Paradise, Displacement

Starting from the island as an imagined place where paradise is constructed, projected, and consumed, the exhibition approaches paradisiacal imagery beyond the promise of happiness, treating it as a political mechanism that organizes desires, movements, and ways of life.

It focuses on how the experience of place becomes destabilized when it is no longer lived in, but instead functions primarily as a stage. Artistic installations, sculptural works, video, sound pieces, and contemporary dance activated within the program highlight how island “paradises” operate as nodes where economic, ecological, and cultural forces converge, producing fluid balances of exposure, care, and vulnerability. The exhibition proposes a renewed understanding of islands as active fields where communities continue to inhabit, resist, and renegotiate the present and possible futures.

Isokratima

Isokratima is a hybrid artistic production combining a digital visual installation and performance. Drawing from the tradition of Pogoni and the concept of the “ison” in polyphonic singing, it forms a unified visual and performative environment in which music, movement, and image—together with polyphonic songs, local narratives, and traditional dances—compose a complex artistic experience.

Model Collapse: Love you, bye

In the exhibition Model Collapse: Love you, bye, Maria Mavropoulou explores parallels between the human brain and artificial intelligence in terms of their decay process. The gradual loss of memories, as it manifests in cases of dementia or Alzheimer’s, is compared to the phenomenon of model collapse in artificial intelligence, where models are fed back with the data they’ve produced, leading to errors.

Following research on patients in the early stages of dementia, the artist documents personal stories and objects associated with their memories while conversing with artificial intelligence applications to comment on the distance between an individual’s contradictory subjectivity and the supposed objectivity of AI models’ data.

The exhibition is enriched by the dialectical relationship between the works and the archaeological findings showcased at the Archaeological Museum of Eretria, a par excellence repository of collective memory.

The work invites audiences to reflect on the significance of human memory and the role of technology in shaping our collective and individual identities.

Iconography 2.0: Cultural Project of Tradition and Innovation NextGenerationTradition

Iconography 2.0 is a groundbreaking cultural project that aims to redefine the dialogue between traditional iconography methods, technological innovation, art, faith, and aesthetics.

The event culminates in an original visual art installation at the Holy Monastery of Our Lady of Akrotiriani and Saint John the Theologian in Toplou, Sitia, where light, image, and sound create a hybrid phygital setting that unfolds throughout the spaces of the Monastery and transforms the visitor’s experience into a multi-sensory journey between the past and present.

Byzantine music and the natural soundscapes of Crete engage in conversation with modern musical compositions and poetic texts, supporting the visual works that will be created as part of the three-day educational and artistic programme preceding the event. This polyphonic dialogue among sound, image, and speech allows for the co-existence of tradition and innovation, creating a new, vibrant space for cultural expression, where art becomes the language of faith, memory, aesthetics, and collectiveness.