The City of the Sleeping

Continuing with the events organized by the Onassis Stegi in the context of the main exhibition of the "Hypnos Project", there will be a sound walk and a sound installation at the First Cemetary, Athens, from 28 May to 19 June.

The First Cemetary, Athens, a place of personal memory where dead bodies are buried, includes some of the most important sculptures of Modern Greek art. At the same time, it is a city within a city with its own sounds of silence. In its entirety the First Cemetary is a historical monument, and Athens’ greatest outdoors museum; an important route, consisting of symbols that speak of personal and political tales and adventures of the Modern Greek state. Broadening the notion of sleep seen as the nexus between contemporary and historical, transcedental and political, memorial and archival, the main exhibition of the Hypnos project invites you to a sound and kinesthetic encounter with this ‘sleeping’ state.

For his sound installation, visual-arts artist Nikos Arvanitis -an Onassis Foundation scholar- chose a place of the living, the canteen, where visitors can evesdrop words, phrases, pauses, as well as the silences of the cemetary’s eminent ‘tenants’.

Musician Dimitris Kamarotos chose a route within those ‘sleeping’, where the visitor can wander among important artworks mutually interacting with the natural soundspace.