After Athens and the Field of Ares, where they gathered more than 400,000 visitors, the “Plásmata II” of the Onassis Foundation Roofhuman, strange, digital, metaphysical, come to inhabit the city of Ioannina, for three weeks, from June 16 to July 9, 2023. With the participation of Greek and international artists, Plásmata II is not yet an exhibition, but an experience interactive and exciting, for viewers of all ages (with free entry), which brings together technology, the city and nature, with concerts and dj-sets, workshops, discussions, educational programs, guided tours and also Movement Radio, the 24-hour online Stegi radio station.

The “Plásmata II: Ioannina” they propose new routes and symbiosis at the border of the city and Lake Pamvotida, expanding the dialogue between the material and the immaterial, the center and the periphery, the past and the future. We are invited to wander through 28 different stations, along a route along the border of the Castle and the lake, where the 19 works of the exhibition dominate, but also the stories that characterize nine distinct, sometimes secret, landmarks of Ioannina. The 28 stations are in inseparable connection with the city environment and are the occasion to discover some visible or occult details, pre-existing elements, fissures, urban fictions and non-human organisms that interact with the works, the Yannens and, above all, with us themselves and our future.

Nineteen artworks by Greek and international artists, most of them new commissions, explore the coming and going of the digital within a new materiality that permeates our bodies, nature, even our thoughts, conversations, songs and dreams . Works that listen to the pulse of the city of Ioannina and introduce us to new Creatures, in a route that develops around the magical lake of Pamvotida.

This year, there parade figures that transform before our astonished eyes, mushrooms that change day by day, sculptures that change colors, sing with human – or non- voices, introduce us to the silversmithing of Ioannina, looking for the ways in which artificial intelligence can save the tradition. Hybrid creatures speak the languages ​​that make up the palimpsest of the city, reveal to us the divination of water as a means of emancipation for the voices that cannot be heard, and materialize local traditions and customs. Lush forests in terrariums, extinct animals but digitally brought back to life, synthetic jellyfish plucked from algorithmic dreams and a body from the women lost in the lake, but always there, invite us to lose ourselves in the forces of nature that are there eternal, strong, indestructible.

With “Plásmata II: Ioannina”, Stegi, as it states in its Press Release, continues the discussion about the digital, not as something structured in flashing LED screens and computer circuits, but as something organic growing in the lake, which looks like with the rain that never stops, inherent in the sounds of the birds and the plane trees of the lakeside route.

Yannena

“Ioannina gives us the possibility to develop our thinking in four dimensions (if we include time), to look at the depths and stratifications of a city that develops like a palimpsest and which extends through the actions and movements of its people beyond from the present time and the finite place”, says Stegi in its announcement and adds: “In Ioannina you realize that the way we perceive technology today is the eternal ritual with which the inhabitants have always coexisted, forming networks that transcended clear boundaries of the lake and the city: Present in every historical period of the Ioannina, in the Turkish rule, the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment and the national benefactors, in the mixing of different religious communities, in the business dynamics of silversmithing, metallurgy and animal husbandry, in their transit position in the Balkans and Europe, but also in migration flows, in its active pulse as a field of action for students in the axis of new knowledge and innovation.

“Artificial intelligence, digital networks and massive gatherings of data are creating our new everyday life, in which the osmosis of physical and digital constitutes our reality. As technology in all its forms acquires a hegemonic character, it gradually disappears from the foreground, leaving only traces. It becomes invisible and ever-present. Claims our time and space. “Plásmata II: Ioannina invites us to look for ways to undermine its hegemony, through the ordinary, the familiar and, at the same time, the open, the mythic and the fluid,” according to the statement.