The exhibition “Mediterranean palimpsests: three enigmas of decay and incorruption” invites to an open dialogue two cultural derivatives of different eras from the same place. An ancient text, the earliest preserved Greek “book” in Europe, the Derveni papyrus, converses with three contemporary works of art, by the artist Dimitris Xonoglou: “The Cross”, “The Logos” and “The Mediterranean Miracle”.

The exhibition, presented in two galleries of the AMTh, unfolds in two different units. In the first unit the works “The Cross” and “The Logos” are in a dialogue with the ancient papyrus, raising the issue of the relationship between the political and institutional power with knowledge and cultural and material goods. In the second, unit the work “The Mediterranean Miracle” highlights the issue of personal responsibility towards knowledge and the choices, according to which everyone constructs, through the plethora of cultural information, their personal cultural palimpsest. The exhibition addresses the perennial question regarding the acquisition and management of knowledge. Knowledge as a collection of cultural information units from different provenance sources, as a dynamic multi-collective construction, which travels through the material and organic bodies in space and time. Knowledge as a personal case, but also as a collective condition for its existence, its definition and preservation. A question that rises urgently through a new prism, in a crucial for humanity era: “how knowledge is transmitted”, “how it is assimilated”, “who manages knowledge” and finally “how knowledge of the past is transformed into creation in the present.

Information:

Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki

Department of Public Relations, Documentation and Publications

6, M. Andronikou Str., PO Box 506 19, 540 13, Thessaloniki

Tel. : (0030) 2310 830538, Fax: (0030) 2310 861306, www.amth.gr