Geometries

Where do these words from the beginning of time come from?

“The Falling Sky, Words of a Yanomami Shaman”, Davi Kopenawa

Draw a vertical line across a horizontal one. Man and Earth. These axes measure the sum of our story. From earth, upwards and onwards; the earth as a beginning and end, and in between the possibility of marking and framing everything we know. As we scratch the surface, hunt, gather, cultivate, grow, carve into and extract from, staking our power and politics, we shout out our own existence in continuum; this is an exhibition that explores humanity’s increasingly complex relationship to its standing ground.

Geometries unfolds in the gardens, museum and central building of the Agricultural University in Athens. Founded in the 1920’s, the University is synonymous with new models of large scale farming, engineered to feed a primarily agricultural but poor nation and to establish food security. In parallel with radical agrarian reforms aimed at incorporating refugees of that period into the social fabric, the University provided a scientific approach to agricultural production.

Set in these grounds, the exhibition investigates this anthropocentric promise of modernity, asking instead whether we can step out of our knowledge systems and networks and re-imagine ourselves at one with our surroundings. Exploring the straight-jacket dyad of humanity and nature, we ask whether we can see our cultural landscapes without domination or ownership and live in ambiguity on this fragile earth; to try and recalibrate the scales and be witnesses of a world where (wo)man kind and other kinds live in kindness together. To understand that the scientific systems that are the logical development of the agricultural revolution, and with whose tools, words and weapons we have fortified ourselves from ‘the wild’, might now be used for a new discussion based on shifting grounds.

Starting with an investigation on site and into the history of the University, and learning from the diverse knowledge produced through the University’s academic and student community and its grounds, the exhibition will both look down at our footprint on this earth and up to the sky as we listen to stories about small-scale farming, cyclical resources, the mapping of geographies, our dark earth and indigenous knowledge, whilst connecting the local and the global in an attempt to better understand our proximity.

The agricultural University lies in the center of the Attica basin, Elaionas, so named due to the olive groves that used to flourish there, watered by the nearby Kifissos river. Now the University is the only remaining green space in the whole area, most of which is an underused, polluted dumping ground. A walk through the University’s gardens is a refreshing take of what was and what could be. Layers of combined history create a distinct stromatography: situated on the Sacred Way to Elefsina, with Plato’s fractured olive tree in the central hall, the residues of the Ottoman governor Haseki’s fountain, generations of students asking questions and a tall swaying Palm tree – who knows what it has seen?

Geometries, apart from an exhibition, is also a framework for asking questions about where we go from here. Through a dense parallel programme which will run through seven Sundays from the opening to the closing of the exhibition, activating different sites of the University (the orchard, the vineyards, the different halls) we invite you to walk, listen, look, come together and become active participants in asking and making, finding pleasure whilst being aware of the moral calculus of our times. We hope that the exhibition and the programmecan try and set some tentative coordinates for mapping a new approach to our relationship to where we live: our land.

Geometries is a meditation on who we are and where we are, together as humans or humus. For lack of a better word. For lack of a better world.

To see more on the public program please look here at the exhibition and program brochure.