Unfolding Mediterranean Sediments

The residency took a nomadic form, by way of placing the artists across different locations (Biella, Alexandria and Athens), and used methodologies that attempted to trace commonalities and highlight spatial and temporal specificities, crossroads and points of entanglement. Athens hosted a group of five practitioners from diverse backgrounds that explored a few of the contemporary challenges, imaginaries and narratives that shape the Greek capital. Their visit to both Athens and Alexandria focused on the urgent themes of memory and identity, on ideas of “southness”, on collectivizing/instituting in times of crisis, and on the usage of public space and gentrification, among others. This focus was made possible to the extent that the themes could be thickly[1] described by local actors in the course of an intense week.

By fragmentarily wandering around the city of Athens, the artists attempted to trace selected debris of the city’s silenced or celebrated past and reveal spaces of contemporary contestation. More specifically, a multiplicity of topics and issues were layered one on top of the other: memory and oblivion, monumentality, tourism, necropolitics, gentrification. Parallel histories are not always visible. Crossroads and entanglements seem to be also embedded in localities, written or uttered in words.

The issue of our own positionality emerged in our conversations:

What does it mean to be a cultural worker today, a traveler, a passerby, a voyeur: What kind of knowledge can be produced for a place?

What results can be extracted in a framework of such geographical and imaginary frameworks like the Mediterranean Sea? Were our results a series of narrations or a narrative? A suppressed conflict, self-defense or a “Mediterranean temperament”?

To address these questions, Onassis Stegi is inviting back to the city the five international artists and researchers (Chiara Cartuccia, Onur Cimen, Zeynep Kaserci, Neja Tomsic, Islam Shabana) that participated in the Athenian program. With this opportunity they will showcase their artistic outcomes and discuss how their research process was affected by their visit to Athens. Additionally, invited local actors who were integral in shaping the program and elevated its themes with their insightful contributions will participate in this theoretical exchange and will come into dialogue with the research outcomes, in the form of an open conversation facilitated by the group.

The title of this public presentation refers to geology, where sedimentation literally describes the process of allowing particles suspended in water to settle out of the suspension under the effect of gravity. Metaphorically, this notion is interesting because it can be used to describe information, knowledge and ideology that become one by moving and finally settling in the seafloor sediment. Particularly inspiring is the thought of Simon de Beauvoir (“The Second Sex”, 1949) and Frantz Fanon (“Black Skin, White Masks”, 1952), who both critiqued and developed Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of sedimented knowledge (“Phenomenology of Perception”, 1945) and value systems. Sedimented knowledge describes a process of unconscious and gradual accumulation of knowledge that shapes subjective perception. Here, we are attempting to dissect and unfold these sediments of knowledge by looking into the cities of Athens and Alexandria connected via a body of water, human movement, common histories, material fragments and narratives that are embedded into urban space.

18:00 – 22:00 | Exhibition open to the public

Artists’ interventions

19:00 – 20:00 | “Place Holder”: On Geographies, Ruins and Belonging – Chiara Cartuccia (Talk)

Chiara Cartuccia reflects on production methodologies for the collective publication “Place Holder”, realized by residents of the Caravan Residency Program, and focuses on the role of orality and how the artists tried to preserve this discursive element throughout the editing process.

20:00 – 20:30 | Regut Garden / Disentangling Villa Rafut’s Park: Notes to a project in becoming – Neja Tomsic (Performance)

Walking into the park of Villa Rafut is like walking into a long-abandoned garden in which tree branches and roots have merged, and the bamboo forest has grown so thick that it is not possible to enter it anymore nor see fragments of the sky. In her contribution, Neja Tomsic takes this place, an entangled garden, as a map of themes and questions connected to the likewise forgotten bonds between Egypt and Slovenia, and the imaginations that supported their erasure from collective memory.

12:00 – 20:00 | Exhibition open to the public

Artists’ interventions

16:00 – 16:30 | Untitled Stories – Onur Çimen (Reading)

“The story goes that the owl of Athena flies every day at sunset, to gather the knowledge of everyday life, then hands it over to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war. The fiction essays of Onur Çimen dissect the owl’s flight, which starts from Athens and necessarily takes a route to the west, because of the Earth’s movement around itself and the Sun.”

The reading invites members of the audience to interact with pieces of writing and vocalize the text-based installation.

17:00 – 19:00 | Unfolding Mediterranean Sediments (Panel Discussion with Temporary Academy of Arts - PAT)

With invitees Elpida Karaba and Despina Zefkili from the Temporary Academy of Arts (PAT), the residents discuss the notions of knowledge production within the imaginary geographies that became the framework upon which the residency program was built upon. The residents describe their work processes, challenges and issues they faced within the context of this residency, and the ways in which they derived meanings from their visits to Athens and Alexandria.