Clay mud covers the floor of the MOMus Experimental Art Center in Thessaloniki. A carpet infested with wheat flies flies in its center. Rhizomes of shoe molds, crystallized paper figurines, and sculptures made from raw materials prepared in the artists’ kitchens create an indoor “Graceland” garden.

Can Nature enter a museum and mother earth materials become works of art? Anything is possible at a biennale that attempts to rediscover the lost link between “earth” and “culture” and keep up with the pressing needs of today’s world. The lively and lively 8th MOMus Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art opens tomorrow with a theme that touches on the hottest topics on the planet: environmental issues, successive crises, climate change, the need to wake up to the threat of ecological catastrophe.

Geoculture presents eight new exhibition productions with the work of about 100 artists, actions and performances, inviting the public to reflect, actively participate and observe the progress of work in some of the most innovative projects offered by contemporary artistic creation.

“It is clear that the criticality of the ecological situation has changed our understanding of the world. Nature is not just a space in which we move, a space that nourishes us. Now there is an awareness that we are part of it, in constant transactions and relationships. Art may not form politics, but it cultivates consciousness and acts as a vehicle for thought and empathy,” notes Biennale director Tuli Misirlogu, who, despite difficulties, succeeded Sirago Tsiaru in managing the event. In this context, Thessaloniki Biennale “seeks not only to awaken our ecological consciousness, but also to multiply the possibilities of the future with new ideas and new demands, tried and tested by the eyes of the creators.”

Vertebrate Program

Three exhibitions at the same number of venues (MST-TEF, Center for Experimental Art-Limani, MMT-Lazarist Monastery) open the modular program. They focus on the stories of places and people, touch on issues of identity, ethics, law, sustainability and equality, offer improvised ecological technologies, explore the possibilities of collective existence and action.

An interesting artistic symbiosis is the scientific and experimental exhibition “Graceland – the triumph of an indefinite path”, created by the joint efforts of three visual artists at the Center for Experimental Art. Rania Emmanuilidu, Fani Buturoglu and the Gospels of Psoma, each with their own path, creatively met during the quarantine due to the coronavirus. They combined their ideas and the experimental recipes they applied with sustainable materials and raw materials, producing unexpected results after about two years in an ongoing collaborative project. During this time, with the help of technologies for the production of bioplastics, paper, crystal growth, planting, rhizomes and “permaculture”, they boiled various environmentally friendly materials in a pot, boiled porridge from it, opened leaves, “embroidered” them and created complex sculptures. They turned small paper figures of people into minerals, and the shoes of refugees into molds for rhizomes. The children’s shoes that arrived from Mytilini after the fire in Moria also gave the exhibition its name, we are told. Its sole still retained the name Graceland, “referring to a place of utopia”.

In the walled garden (curated by Anna Mikoniatis) with numerous readings (desertification, overexploitation of natural resources, displacement of people, dispersion, uprooting, rhizomes), all materials are in an indefinite direction. Will bioplastic sculptures, rhizomes and minerals survive? The wet clay has already begun to crack, like the arid landscape of a video performance on which a carpet of germinated wheat is spread, sown by the artists.

Graceland’s works were made especially for the Biennale, and the main exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACE), curated by Thodoris Markoglu and Katerina Siroglu, which revisits the theological narrative of The Ark and focuses on interpretation from 43 Greek and foreign artists, presents more than 75 works of art (painting, sculpture and new media) from the permanent collections of the MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Modern Art.