ET IN ARCADIAEGO with Filopappou artgroup | ATHENS – FLOISVOS FALIRO 2009

About This Project

A collectively designed interactive intervention-installation in public space with performative actions and conferences-presentations, with variable sizes, and mixed materials: plastic Billboard sticker on 4mCh2m metal construction, furniture, benches, soil, referbished bicycles, cards, and more. The project was exposed to the 2nd Athens Biennale Heaven-Live, from 14 to 28 June 2009, in Flisvos Falirou, curated by Zafos Xagoraris and Dimitris Papaioannou. (omadafilopappou.blogspot.com)

Keywords: visual environment, paradise, collective, community, ephemeral space, workshops, reactivation

A different garden invites the visitors to become part of it. We created an environment, a place for gathering, a site of immanent scenery, which hosts the negotiation of the subject-related issues seeking utopia. Our group research and study, as well as our stroll through Poussin’s painting ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, drove us to consider topics such as natural and artificial paradise, pause and movement, the flourishing of people and artificial flora, death and eternity, rhizome and passage, collectivity and community. There, one enters an ephemeral place of concentration and focusing, which is mobile and different every day, and also requires accomplices the exhibition viewers. In front of a commercial type mega-poster we gathered furniture picked up from around Athens, so to host and accommodate our guest-audience attending workshops, speeches and presentations taking place in situ.

Filopappou Art Group initiated its activity in 2001 doing the “One Night Show 37o-58oB/23o-43A” at the ancient quarry located on Filopappou hill located next to Acropolis’ holly rock. The group consists of an open modified scheme of artists, without central organization or a leadership and without official members. Our coexistence leis in a networking type of artists’ assembly. The participants flow through the itineraries and points of this network. The actions of the group point in one hand to the reactivation of places and on the other, undertake to push forward the collective manner of artistic practices. The making of various activities or collective works comes out of juvenilia concepts put out from the participants, developed or modified from the rest of the group. In most of the actions the game consists one of the main medium of activation for the participants. The purpose is to draw those terms which allow production of collective or personalized work making.