This week in Thessaloniki, the program “Artecitya. Envisioning the City of Tomorrow (2014-2018)” comes to an end and Theodoros Zafeiropoulos will be there to work on his installation in progress “Homeland”, initiated in 2015.
The installation HomeLand is an exhibition of a collection of soil (Land) samples. A great number of participants offer samples that they have collected from the place each one of them considers his/her country of origin, his/her homeland (Home). The samples, using the ancient rammed-earth technique, are molded and casted into the recesses of the wall that divides Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki and the Fοlklife and Ethnological Museum of Macedonia-Thrace, and remain there as permanent exhibits.
The project’s central goal is to bring citizens of all social groups in contact with the primal and symbolic materiality of the soil (ground), to introduce them, through experiential workshops, to the process of earth-ramming and casting, and at the same time to create a website that hosts the relevant information and data, functioning as a universal interactive communication channel (portal).
Visually, the soil’s heterogeneous color shades, condensed in the wall’s recesses, compose a gigantic mosaic in earth tones that does not aim to create an outdoors installation offered to public view, but the wall’s transformation into a topographic map to create a multilevel aesthetic experience.
It is also a toolbox for (social, ethnological, anthropological, geological) research, since the creation of a communication mechanism and a call for participants addressed to Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki’s collaborators, citizens, institutions and the city’s wider public activates a universal network related to the identity, origin and lineage of the offering/donation. The wall ceases to be a blind boundary and becomes a portal, a door to the world. The 4600 samples gathered from the participants in conjunction with the additional digital material and the workshop experience form an original material meta-object, which can constitute an open field for future research in various areas of humanities and sciences.
The program “Artecitya. Envisioning the City of Tomorrow” (2014-2018)” is realised by Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki in collaboration with ArtBOX.gr| Creative Arts Management, with the support of the Creative Europe program of the European Union.
www.artecitya.gr/goethes-dream.html
www.artecitya-homeland.gr
