This
workshop engages scholars, curators, and artists in a response
to the multimedia project “Liquid Antiquity,” commissioned
by the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, in order to extend
further its explorations of alternative models of engaging classical
antiquity and to enrich collaboration between the academic and
art worlds in new forms of public engagement around the legacies of
classicism.
“Liquid
Antiquity,” is a platform for radically rethinking the relationship
between the classical and the contemporary. Antiquity is an
irrepressible source of meaning today. But what it means is never
fixed in stone. It must instead be continually rethought for an
always changing “we” under always changing conditions of local
and global significance. Resisting classicism as dead weight, “Liquid
Antiquity” aims to make the ancient Greek past available as a fluid
resource for the present by shifting attention from the matter of
antiquity to the question of why antiquity matters. “Liquid
Antiquity” was therefore designed as an exhibition without
antiquities that stakes out the book as its primary site. Through
word and image, the
book stages an encounter with a “liquid” antiquity as well as
a series of reflections on this encounter through contemporary
artistic practice and the history of classicism over millennia.
Spanning twenty-five hundred years in an unprecedented collaboration
between leading artists, theorists, writers, art historians,
classicists, cultural historians, and archaeologists, “Liquid
Antiquity” is a handbook, deeply collaborative in spirit and
experimental in form, for the creative work of reimagining the
present through the ancient past. It is complemented by a
video installation designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro on view
in the antiquities galleries at the Benaki Museum in Athens.
“Liquid
Antiquity: A New Fold” is inspired by two guiding commitments of
the initial project: first, the commitment to collaboration and
conversation; and second, the commitment to a way forward that is
always unpredictably emergent out of the past—hence, the idea of a
fold introduced here. An interdisciplinary group of scholars
and artists are invited to reflect on “Liquid Antiquity” and
think together about strategies—conceptual, aesthetic,
pragmatic—for the ongoing work of “doing” classical reception
under the sign of liquidity. Time will be primarily
devoted to discussion rather than formal presentation.
“Liquid
Antiquity: A New Fold” is organized by Dimitri Gondicas (Princeton
Athens Center), Brooke Holmes (Princeton/Postclassicisms), and Polina
Kosmadaki (Benaki Museum) and supported by the Seeger Center for
Hellenic Studies and Postclassicisms.
Confirmed
participants:
Joy
Connolly (The Graduate Center at CUNY)
Richard
Fletcher (Ohio State University)
Phoebe
Giannisi (University of Thessaly)
Constanze
Güthenke (Oxford University)
Brooke
Holmes (Princeton University)
Despina
Katapoti (University of the Aegean)
Polina
Kosmadaki (Benaki Museum)
Christodoulos
Panayiotou (Independent Artist)
Nina
Papaconstantinou (Independent Artist)
Dan-el
Padilla Peralta (Princeton University)
Stefania
Strouza (Independent Artist)
Giorgos
Tzirtzilakis (University of Thessaly/DESTE Foundation for
Contemporary Art)
Kostis
Velonis (Independent Artist)
