Geometries

Draw a vertical line across a horizontal one. Human 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.

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.