Presentation by Campus Novel “The Host, Operator and Initiator”
Sunday, March 05 2023, 12:00
Venue: MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art (154 Egnatia Av. TIF-HELEXPO premises)
What structural elements that make up soil, allow a relationship between human and non-human? Artist collective Campus Novel with their on-site performative research of the city of Thessaloniki have created a multi-modal archive on soil and the semiotics of co-existence.
Campus Novel follow a ‘totemic’ exploration, from bottom up, moving from life processes in the underground upwards to the urban environment. The correlations discovered between subjects, communities, and a multitude of human and non-human elements and species, takes the form of an archive that includes idiosyncratic narratives of the city and reflects elements of urban cosmopolitanism as well as the imprint of multiple communities with different identities and histories. The materiality of Campus Novel’s research is presented in the form of a multi-layered installation, that includes the research process itself, as well as specially designed structures, imaginative recordings, kilos of fertile soil, and subterranean finds.
As a site for showcasing micro/macro fundamentals of coexistence, the ‘fluid’ territoriality of Thessaloniki is presented as both a case study as well as a fertile field from which one can ‘extract’ methodologies, new value standards, and re-framings of what it means to belong.
In a city where each person is entitled only 1,6 square meters of free ground, segregations collapse, the local can be interpreted also as planetary; tradition and modernity are homogenized; and each unit acts, inclusively, sometimes as a host, sometimes as an effector and sometimes as a mystic.
The event is taking place in the frame of the “Being as Communion” main exhibition of the 8th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. Their works are being presented in the MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art.