Walls, real and symbolical, visible and invisible, are raised everywhere around us. They are intertwined with the geography of a place, its political identity, with its history and many of its cultural claims .
Equal importance has “the geography of souls”. These walls, which are raised by the human psyche and are sometimes used as protection mechanisms, sometimes as exclusion engines, and sometimes as symbolic constructions of repelling or idealizing our desires and passions.
There are walls that are low and fragile, such as dry stone walls in the gloomy landscapes of Greece, bounding without definitely binding the look and passage, and others, high and impenetrable, constructing utopias or dystopias where ruin, discontinuity, exclusion, exile, exists. In the history of art, the walls often appear as ruins, reminding the viewer of the inevitable change that exists in their function over time.
In poetry, and especially in Cavafy’s poetry, the walls (and the walls) identify the spaces where imagery, imagination and language are functioning, recreating the feeling and the experience. In philosophy, the walls sometimes appear as obstacles between the mind and reality, sometimes as transports of mortality or existential deadlock, sometimes as challenges of moral overcoming or creative break with established beliefs. The interdisciplinary meeting titled Walls: boundaries, boundaries, obstacles explores the conceptual functions of the “wall” in contemporary visual arts, the history of art, poetry and philosophy.
Christos Savvides, Artistic Director
