American marine biologist Rachel Carson set herself a big and passionate goal in the early 1950s: to write a “biography” of the oceans around us. It was published in a book called “The Sea Around Us” which, with its exciting combination of scientific information, poetic writing and a pioneering ecological perspective, made a huge impact and won its hard bet.

Seventy-one years later, in Athens, somewhere in the vicinity of Tavros, three kilometers from the Saronic coast, a three-month artistic, scientific and educational program of the same name (“The Sea around us”) opens. The art space of Tavros, in someone’s likeness, thus paying tribute to this monumental work by Carson. This rich marine panorama is rediscovered in deep waters, setting a distant goal as wide and universal as the sea itself and our ancient connection to it.

The three-month program (October 14, 2022 – January 28, 2023), within four main aspects – research, visual, educational and a series of displays – opens a window to maritime stories that spread from the Aegean Sea, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea and reach Asia and the seven seas of the planet.

In its research chapter, the program shows us archival material resulting from a two-year architectural and historical study by the EKPA Laboratory of History and Theory of Architecture on the traces left by Greek merchants and sailors in two predominantly “Greek” cities. within the wider borders of the Mediterranean, the two coastal metropolises of our country’s ever-strong maritime culture, Odessa and Marseille.

From the sparkling symbols of the prosperity of prominent people, the symbolic ports of the Greek fleet, we move on to the visual chapter of the program (curated by Maria-Thalia Karras, founder of Tavros), which looks like a global kaleidoscope of the invisible. sea ​​heroes. These unsung heroes appear in a series of shows curated by Delfina Lekkas that portray the sea as a place of toil, magic but also horror, and a group exhibition.

There, Nikos Marcou displays his materials on visits he made 40 years ago to the modest homes of sailors in Perama. Where he became interested in the “essential architecture” of their makeshift shacks and wanted to get to know their inhabitants. As he notes, “the time I spent with these families was so much more than the time I spent photographing them.” “I hope,” he says touchingly, “looking at them, the viewer will be able to feel something that I could never put into words.” Indeed, these black and white portraits seem to be staring you straight in the face, haunted by the ghosts of an early 80s Greece that no longer exists. Hellenic roofs fortified with stones, and in the background the dreary bay of Salamis, dotted with ships at anchor, children playing among the shacks, and couples who do not know what storms and what bitterness can hide their eyes and what simple everyday joys they have in their days. .

The three-month Sea Around Us program in Tavros aims to open a window for us from the Aegean to Asia.

Artist Eutychis Patsourakis also draws his material from the marine life of the anonymous, collecting marine paintings of strangers and stitching them together to create a common horizon. Terrible clouds, waves and ships beating in them, everything is drawn by the hands of “naive” painters who never had a name and status in the field of art. As if in a small impromptu group exhibition of some eternally unknown people who once dreamed of that very sea, without knowing it, now we look at it through their eyes.

Everyday anonymous figures in the coastal landscape, in ports, on piers or marinas, residents of nearby areas going about their daily business, or visitors from other parts of the city who wanted to breathe in the sea air, are the silent protagonists of the photographs taken. photographer Giorgos Salame from Marseille and Sicily to Egypt, Lebanon and Old Faliro in a section called “White Middle Sea” (the name of the Mediterranean Sea in Arabic). At the same time, a versatile young American (now almost Greek, living between New York, Athens and Syros) Jacob Moe, organizer of the Syros International Film Festival, brings the sounds and melodies of old Syros and the archipelago to the exhibition. And from Syros, one of the birthplaces of maritime commercial shipping, we set off for a months-long sea barque of thousands of invisible sailors from the Philippines. Swiss visual artist Lena-Maria Thering takes us there with a video, and she does it with a clever trick: in a parallel action, we observe what is happening inside the restaurant area of ​​a merchant ship to the left of the projection, and landscapes opening around to the right: cloudy horizons floating through the ocean and overnight ports. And while the sea, removed from human affairs, continues its eternal movement, we see sailors glued to karaoke, singing bad rock songs, laughing and having fun somewhere on the verge of loneliness, fatigue and anxiety.

Some other “expendables” living off the sea also work in dangerous posts in Pakistan’s information centers. Thousands of people flock from all corners of the country to make a living there on the gigantic, rusting – often deadly – hulls of the once-proud merchant ships. In this documentary by Hira Nabi, the ship takes on a human voice in its final moments. “Why don’t you love me anymore,” “why don’t you need me,” he says to the workers disassembling it, and so the circle closes: from the proud, ambitious and brilliant birthplaces of ships, the homeland of their builders and owners, such as Odessa, to the places of their last breath, to the “pawnshops” of Asia. From shipyards to scrap metal: a cycle of birth and death, reminiscent of the sea itself, where everything begins and ends.

As Rachel Carson put it in her acclaimed 1951 book, which bears the same title as the exhibition opening at the Taurus on October 14: “…the sea is all around us. Trade from all ends of the earth must cross it. The winds that blow over the earth are born on its immensity and constantly strive to return to it. Even the continents break up and fall into it, and the rains flowing from it become rivers and return to it. In its mysterious past it contains within itself all the vague beginnings of life and, after so many transformations, takes on the dead shell of that very life. Because everything, in the end, returns to the sea – to the Ocean River, to the immovable flow of time, the beginning and the end.

“The Sea Around Us”, October 14, 2022 – January 28, 2023, Anaxagoras 33 @locusathens.