Plásmata ΙΙ: Ioannina

Plásmata ΙΙ: Ioannina presents a series of artworks on the digital, the worlds we make and which, eventually, belong to. After Athens and Pedion tou Areos, where Plásmata captivated the Athenian public with more than 400,000 visitors, Onassis Stegi travels to the historic city of Ioannina from June 16 to July 9, 2023. Plásmata ΙΙ: Ioannina is not just another exhibition; it is rather an experience bringing together technology, the city, and nature. It is addressed to visitors of every age, with concerts and DJ sets, workshops, discussions, educational programs, guided tours, and Movement Radio, Stegi’s 24-hour online radio station, which compiles a deeply local, and therefore truly global, program. Plásmata II: Ioannina proposes new itineraries and symbioses at the boundary of the city and Lake Pamvotida, broadening the dialogue between the material and immaterial, the center and the periphery, the past and the future.

Plásmata II: Ioannina invites us to wander through 28 different spots along a route at the border of the Castle and the lake, where the 19 works of the exhibition dominate the scenery, together with stories that characterize 9 distinct, and at times secret, landmarks of Ioannina. These 28 stations remain intrinsically entwined with the environment of the city and become the springboard for discovering several visible or invisible details, existing elements, crevices, urban mythologies, and non-human organisms that converse with the works, Ioannina, and, above all, our selves and our very future.

19 artworks by Greek and international artists, most of them new commissions, explore the advent and dissolution of the digital within an unprecedented materiality that dissipates into bodies, nature, and even our very thoughts, songs, and dreams. Works that heed the pulse of the city of Ioannina and introduce us to new Plásmata along a route that unfolds around the majestic Lake Pamvotida. There parade this year figures that transform before our awestruck eyes, mushrooms that mutate day by day, sculptures that change colors and chant in human and non-human voices, initiating us into the “gianniotiki” silversmithing and knitting, seeking the ways in which artificial intelligence may salvage tradition. Hybrid creatures are speaking the languages that compose the city’s palimpsest, revealing hydromancy as a means of emancipation for those voices that cannot be heard, and materializing local traditions and customs. Full-bloomed forests inside terrariums, animals that have become extinct but are digitally restored to life, synthetic medusas born out of algorithmic dreams, and a body made from the women lost in the lake but forever belonging there, invite us to lose ourselves among the forces of nature that remain primeval, potent, and indissoluble

See the birds of the lake and Mitsikeli through the eyes of artificial intelligence; go into polyphonic singing; marvel at a flag of flames that waves as if in the middle of the lake; wander with your imagination within an immersive bath of sounds, images, and words for Ioannina and its history; take a dive digitally to the bottom of the lake on the side of a medusa; and live the adventure along with human, metaphysical, digital, and strange creatures.

With Plásmata II: Ioannina, Onassis Stegi continues the discussion on the digital, not as something structured in shimmering LED screens and computer circuits, but as something organic that grows in the lake, that looks like the rain that never ceases, that exists in the sounds of the birds and the plane trees across the lakeside route. Ioannina gives us the opportunity to develop our thinking in four dimensions (i.e., time included), to look at the depths and stratifications of a city that develops like a palimpsest, and that extends through the actions and movements of its people beyond the present time and finite place. In Ioannina, you realize that the way we perceive technology today is the perpetual ritual by which its inhabitants have always lived together forming networks that transcend the clear boundaries of the lake and the city; networks present in every historical period of Ioannina: during the Ottoman occupation, the Modern Greek Enlightenment, and the national benefactors; in the mingling of the different religious communities; in the business potential of silversmithing, metallurgy, and animal husbandry; in their transit position in the Balkans and Europe, but also in migratory flows, in its clear pulse as an action field for students on the axis of new knowledge and innovation.

Artificial intelligence, digital networks, and mass accumulation of data comprise our new everyday life, in which the osmosis of the physical and digital constitutes our new reality. As technology develops a hegemonic presence through its various aspects, it gradually recedes from the forefront, leaving only traces behind; it is rendered invisible and, therefore, ever-present, claiming our time and space. Plásmata II:Ioannina invites us to seek ways to undermine its hegemonic status through the notions of the ordinary, the familiar, and at the same time unfamiliar, mythical, and liquid, that which surfaces in the locus of Ioannina and the very reason why Plásmata II is here.

Image

Image

Artistic Direction: Afroditi Panagiotakou

Curatorial Direction: Prodromos Tsiavos

Curatorial Advisor: Yorgos Tzirtzilakis

Associate Curator (Commissions): Daphne Dragona

Music Curation, Movement Radio Direction: Voltnoi & Quetempo

Head of Production: Vassilis Panagiotakopoulos

Technical Director: Lefteris Karabilas

Exhibition Design: Loukas Bakas, Iason Pantazis

The exhibition is a production of the Onassis Stegi.

Under the auspices of the Region of Epirus and the Municipality of Ioannina, in collaboration with the University of Ioannina.

Participating artists: Entangled Others, Matthias Fritsch, John Gerrard, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Nikomachi Karakostanoglou, Katerina Komianou, Christian Mio Loclair, Maria Louizou, Maenads, Manolis Manousakis & Afroditi Panagiotakou, Matthew Niederhauser & Marc Da Costa, Malvina Panagiotidi, Panos Sklavenitis, slow immediate, Stefania Strouza, Theo Triantafyllidis, Universal Everything, Maria Varela, WordMord.

Read more

Plásmata II: Ioannina – Human, metaphysical, digital, strange | Onassis Foundation (onassis.org)