COSMOS

XI BIENNIAL OF YOUNG ARTISTS FROM EUROPE AND MEDITERRANEAN

Cosmographies, cosmopolitanism and digi-cosmos in the imagination of young artists
5-16 June 2003
Athens, Ilios' Tower Park

Talking about the Mediterranean Sea, the historian Fernand Braudel had stressed the need to stop seeing the contemporary Mediterranean as a lake. As this is all about the size, we should not forget that in the times of Augustus and Antonio, during the Crusades or even when the fleet of Philip II roamed it, the Mediterranean appeared to have a hundred or a thousand times the size now revealed to us by modern sea or air travel .Thus, our foremost concern should be to assign to it its true dimensions; to imagine it as a huge piece of clothing. For, it was once in itself a whole universe, a planet.

So, to the people of Antiquity and the Middle Ages the Mediterranean was an open, expansive universe, the origin of light and shadow, sanctity and sacrilege, moderation and excess, unity and discord, the contrasting and the complementary, the exchange of ideas and the compilation of theories.
The wanderings of the adventurous Odysseus, who found himself at the ends of the earth, the journeys of Alexander and Marco Polo, Leopardi's poetry, El Greco's stormy skies, folk legends, the idealised South of the Romantics, the impressive twists of the delicate Mediterranean landscape, of the inaccessible, sheer drops to the sea, the meditations of Paul Valery and Fernando Pessoa, the extraordinary derive of the Situationists-these are some of the elements which have nurtured our imagination and fed it with images; the modern life and contrasts and vitality of the cities took care of the rest.
Yet, as early as in the Odyssey, the archetype of a traveller's tale, two opposed tendencies are in clash: the need for homecoming- the return to oikos, against the urge to face the open- to go beyond the horizon towards infinity. Ithaca and Penelope represent the first tendency; the island of the Phaeacians and the adventurous spirit of Athena the other one. Odysseus' journey is an encounter with the unknown and the variable, which presupposes relations between one and many, possible and impossible, the finite and the 'untapped' infinity. As soon as Odysseus returns from his travels, having formed a new attitude, he announces a new departure-for good.

Our entry to the 21st century has been accompanied by promises and threats which reflect those opposing tendencies in the Odyssey, sometimes under different names and often in extreme ways. The 11th Biennale of Athens invites young artists from Europe and Mediterranean countries, as well as the people of the city, to explore the new aspects of the opening up of the world and the ways in which we visualise the transcendence of limits and the horizon.
It is not only the time before, the Mediterranean-as-identity, but the Mediterranean-as-prospect which best describes what it is all about: a space-motion, in the full sense of the word (Braudel), the source of perpetual flows and encounters which make both the Mediterranean and Europe a place of relations, dialogue and confrontation. Nothing here is hierarchically organised around a fixed axis: the centre is everywhere.

In this sense the Biennial will deal with some of the most interesting issues concerning the young artists of our time: landscape and space, new experiences of travelling, relationships, environment, quest for the alternative and the impossible, mobility, co-existence of the classical concept of beauty founded on moderation and harmony with the sense of the infinite and the sublime that informs contemporary aesthetics, dynamics of big cities, and the new technologies.
The Biennial will record the ways in which young artists depict, invoke, draw or imagine space, natural and artificial landscape, the feasible and unfeasible, journeys , relationships, environment-in one word, the cosmos, in all its complexity.
Nowadays, everybody refers to this world more than ever before. Yet we need to understand it before we can conceive and propose anything. The world is exactly the way we perceive it. This results from a social or cultural as well as a mental process, and also includes institutional constructions and discursive practices. Thus, a central question, to all fields of art and to all young artists, is whether we can feasibly depict the complexity of this world or we can only speak for ourselves, of our own subjective microcosm, or at least draw from it.
Such a dilemma provides food for modern creativity, producing works and interpretations where new cosmographies (aimed at describing the contemporary world) and the digi-cosmos can meet cosmopolitanism (according to Jacques Derrida: the stranger becomes friend and one cultural idiom adjusts to another). At a time when everybody talks about the challenges and feats of globalisation, the creation of a society-cosmos, based on synthesis rather than the substitution of cultures, is now more imperative then even before.

The venue for the Biennial's activities will be the Park of Environmental Awareness at Ilion (Queen's Tower), a diverse area and a sort of miniature of the Mediterranean Attica landscape in the western part of Athens. Young artists from all over Europe and the Mediterranean shall have an opportunity to extend their activities over the public open areas of the park. These works shall enable visitors to discover ways to enhance the experience from the park, at the same time drawing our attention to the ways in which these young artists see the cosmos we live in. The choice of the specific venue has a goal of upgrading a neglected area cut off from cultural activities at international level, which are mostly organised at the city centre or close to archaeological sites. Whole decades of this bias have led to discrimination, promoting a culturally favoured centre over generally neglected periphery; undermining the city's social functioning and unitary character.

Yet the aspect of the city changes, and so does our perception of it. The hosting of the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004 provides an opportunity for some long-range intervention in the urban and suburban environment-new public areas and facilities, extension of the underground network, improvement of the road network, construction of motorways and flyovers. This will redress the balances and relations between city centre and periphery. The decline of such division and the abolishment of boundaries may well be the next step. What was seen as periphery until a few years back and described with exceptional lyrical intensity by neo-realist film directors-is no longer a clearly charted and delineated area, exactly because of its unlimited expansion. The old single-centred territorial and social structure of the city is redefined - although not abolished - by a series of long-term projects, rapid social change, new patterns of production and consumption, and new lifestyles.

Despite a deficient infrastructure, the western region of Athens has maintained an exceptional vitality throughout the years. Its own dense energy, a relatively autonomous functionality and a network of relations with the various centres of the city, cultivating a youth culture of the west-side , which still carries traces of the historical tradition, has marked the Attican landscape in various ways.
The 11th Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean aims to profit by this experience and overthrow the single-centre conventions by relocating the centre; to organise a central cultural event in the periphery of Athens, a meeting point for the Mediterranean youth as well as for the entire city, an event which will showcase the character of the area, will pave the way for the forthcoming changes.