VOL. lxiv


μεταφορά- μεταφοραί/
wolrd fairs, cultural-transports and historiography



https://vimeo.com/194752637

With the installation μεταφορά-μεταφοραί [wolrd fairs, cultural-transports and historiography] I investigate the transport of the Greek Pavilion from the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris to Athens, and the negotiations for the transport of the Hermes of Praxiteles statue from Olympia to the World fair of 1964-65 in New York. Within today’s constantly transformed world of global ows it is called for new approaches of the past, which correspond to the ambiguities, multi-perspective and polyphonic realities of the world. Between globality and locality and vice versa I try through the appropriation of practices a “relational and interactional” transnational approach of the ‘Histoire croisée’, to reconstruct the two transports (μεταφοραί) - cases as a paradigmatic artistic hypothesis. Using the example of the pavilion and the statue my goal is to recast these two transports (μεταφοραί) as an artistic synecdoche highlighting the interface between the (seemingly opposed) tendencies of globality and locality. I perceive the two transports (μεταφοραί) as a shift to transfer and metaphor. It acts on one hand as an allegory that confuses while traverses the spaces of history and provokes ragtag compositions and shifts, as well as juxtaposes of new images. On the other hand it as an artfully arranged rhetorical argument that thus becomes the basis for an artistic argument respecting the ambiguity of the current ideas and requirements of the world: to interweave di erent historical perspectives and directions of the world within a single unifying framework.