Multitudinous seas

For the 17th edition of Propos d’Europe, yearly contemporary art exhibition dedicated to cultural diversity in Europe, the Hippocrène Foundation invites Iordanis Kerenidis and Piergiorgio Pepe, collectors and founders of the Phenomenon association, to present an exhibition and a program.The project brings together all participants from the project Phenomenon that takes place every two years on the remote Greek island of Anafi. Phenomenon includes performances, conferences, projections and an exhibition throughout Anafi and has been exploring since 2015 questions around (in)visibility in relation to language, light, history, and marginality. Phenomenon has recently been awarded the prestigious 2018 Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award for Greece.Multitudinous Seas questions the conditions that may enable transposing a “peripheral” project like Phenomenon to the “centre” of Europe and the types of possible strategies that can destabilize binary constructs, like periphery and centre, North and South, citizens and refugees. One reason that such binary oppositions are perpetuated is that the corresponding words have been so strongly associated with each other and with their stereotypical properties – the civilized centre, the lazy South, the job-stealing refugees, the entitled citizens, etc. The project hopes to disentangle such categories from their normative associations and create differential and unstable connections, without denying the specificities, questions and needs of the places concerned. How else to talk, in a pro-European foundation situated in the workshop of a famous modernist architect located in the center of Europe, about Greece or the crisis, other than trying to undo stereotypes and propose new unions, new perspectives, and meanings for such specificities, questions and needs? This questioning was triggered by the only audio recording of Virginia Woolf, where she underlines that it is very difficult to use certain words because they have contracted so many associations in the past, so many “famous marriages”. She wonders, using Shakespeare’s Macbeth as an example, who can use the word “incarnadine” without thinking of “multitudinous seas”.

http://www.phenomenon.fr/multitudinous-seas.html