EC(H)O-LOGY: Greek Returns

After centuries of idealization as the “origin” of the European culture, Greece has turned almost overnight into the emblem of Europe’s biggest fear: economic decline and political disintegration. Europe, caught in its own mirror-image, has dropped Greece like Narcissus, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, rejected the water nymph Echo. But the repressed always returns and the voice of Echo cannot be muted. In our expedition to Athens and Olympia we are interested in the echoes of history as well as in the issues of today’s economy and ecology. We will ask how the current crisis affects the every-day space and the life of the people. We will look at the way the city and its periphery was planned and shaped in the early 19th century and again in the postwar-boom. And we will visit “Arcadia”, listening to the echoes of a past age, which was never ours, but which cannot be separated from our own imagination and memory.