A resident of Volos is faced with a physical symptom: When he moves around the city and especially when he has relative apnea, he feels a burning sensation in his eyes. The symptom appears persistently and the medical diagnosis cannot identify its cause. So he decides to collect evidence from his daily life and material traces in the environment, his natural and artificial surroundings, which may be related to the persistent eye condition. He collects materials such as: tree leaves, water, the air we breathe, earth, milk and feces from lambs and goats grazing in the area, concrete samples, combustible rdf waste. The collected elements constitute the materials for an investigation into the causes of its pathogenesis, which will supposedly result from their chemical analysis. But not only that. They constitute a collection of documents from the operation of a cement factory in the middle of the city and the influence of its operation on urban metabolism. Perhaps the research on the chemical composition of the collected materials by research centers, local or international, will not yield a definitive interpretation of the relationship between the operation of the factory and the health of the city’s residents. In any case, the collection constitutes a personal museum, a kind of memory, perhaps traumatic, of life in the city of Volos. The personal museum, from a factory that is still in operation, is placed in an exhibition, in the space of the former “Tsalapata” pottery. It reminds us that everything that belongs to the past, no matter how grim it may have been, can be idealized by its transformation into a museum mechanism. And in any case, for one or another factory there is a time of viability and a limited life span. The present is the archaeology of our future.
Installation at the Brick and Ceramics Museum of the PIOP Museum Network
Exhibition “Terra In-Cognita” curated by Faye Tsanetoulako
Collaborating institutions: PIOP-AICA