Contemporary art exhibition 2020 “Images of a floating world”

Contemporary art exhibition, 12-30 September 2020, Aigio, Greece

Primarolia organisation, the Municipality of Aigialeia and DHKEPA (Municipal Public Benefit Eterprise of Aigialeia) organize the 2nd Primarolia Festival “Mobilities“, 12-30 September 2020, in Aigio Greece. The festival includes a series of cultural events, workshops and the international contemporary art exhibition “Images of a floating world“.

Nine artists from Greece, Great Britain and Italy arrive in Aigio to conduct a dialogue with the local and to create new works of art. Motivated by Primarolia Festival, the landscape of the region and also the timeless commercial, nutritional, historical, social and cultural value of the Corinthian currant. 

The opening day of the exhibition will take place on Saturday, September 12th at 20:00, opening this way this year’s festival.  

The exhibition – curated by Nansy Charitonidou – holds a site-specific characteristic as it develops within an emblematic, preservable and restored building, one of the oldest currant warehouses which carry the industrial history of the city and also its cintemporary culture. The building, owned by Kanellopoulos-Kritsotalakis, was built in 1900 as a currant warehouse, the office and house of a great currant trader, while in 1985 was a place of inspiration for Theo Angelopoulos for his movie “The Beekeeper” as Cine Pantheon. 

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The movement is a function of existence. The human impulse to travel and explore has always led us to unexpected discoveries but also tragic debacles. Homer’s Odysseus becomes a staple of world literature as the work highlights the importance of voyages and travels for humans, as well as the trajectories, the path-become-experience, the “Laistrygonians and Cyclops”, the enduring struggle for repatriation. 

The sea had always functioned as both a physical and metaphorical space of communication and movement, ensuring passage to the unknown and the uncharted. In the 19th century, Greece’s connection with various European ports, essentially due to trade, created and fostered links with up-coming urban hubs and foreign cultures. Locations such as Aigio, Patras, Pyrgos, Kalamata, Corinth, Zakynthos were in continuous contact with European ports by exporting internationally the famous Corinthian currant (Vostizza) cultiveted across the rich territories of Aigialeia, Achaea; facing the Corinthian Gulf. Cargo, people, the open sea, and countless stories-everything in movement-reflecting the etymological origin of Aigio which derives from the Homeric verb “aisso”, meaning to move rapidly, describing the city’s position next to a constantly moving sea, or as the moving of active tectonic plates due to earthquakes. A perpetual mobility, therefore, both in literal and metaphorical terms from antiquity to today brings to the surface artistic, cultural and narrative aspects, as the personal, social, meterial and organic threads are woven at the loom of life, like the shroud of a constant Penelope. 

You may read more in the curatorial text of the exhibition.