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Futures Garden

05 July - 30 August 2024

Futures Garden

“FUTURES GARDEN” is a new art exhibition by 3Portes Gallery, featuring the works of 14 artists. Powered by TechFuse and inspired by the futures design work, Erica Bol Conscious Future Designer of the European Union's Joint Research Centre, and Epaminondas Christophilopoulos Chairholder Unesco Chair on Futures Research. The exhibition launches in Ioannina on July 5th and will be available for visitors to explore until August 30th, 2024.

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Curated by Sophie Fardella and Tassos Kaliakatsos

Participating Artists 

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Guest Artist Theoretician

Photos of the Exhibition 

Photos by Evaggelia Ziova

Let's talk about Futures

"Man, and all that is vagabond and lost in him, could probably be summed up in these two syllables: Garden" - Louis Aragon

Let's talk about potential futures. Let's think and imagine their various possibilities. Starting from our most fundamental concepts, principles, theories, and laws, what if by acting now we can exceed above and beyond our current state of being. Together, why not create the images that could very well narrate the story of such tomorrows. And let's remember this quote by André Breton: "Only imagination realises the possible in me, and it is enough to lift for a moment the dreadful proscription; enough also for me to abandon myself to it, without fear of error" A visionary thinker and artist, he never ceased to defend the values of this beloved imagination. Man can achieve so much more if he’d only listen to his powerful chimeras. Does the future lie right before us? Thinking about the future means cultivating a range of data in your garden, that is essential to its creation. But it also means trying to understand that the future represents much more than a single level within the infinite layers of time. In the present, the future has a complex, labyrinth-like architecture; outside reality, near or far, it is a mirage. Although it does not yet exist, it nevertheless influences our decisions. With its eye peering into the distance, the future drives the mechanics of our behavior. Elusive, it never fully reveals itself. A mere idea, or a glimpse into what it might become, it has a multitude of fragments. Our curiosity is fuelled over and over again, yet equally escapes us over and over again. By running behind it, it only reveals its immensity. The future is certainly not static; it grows and grows as we evolve. What makes it so attractive is that it is a place of transformation. While regret and memory belong to the past, the future is the zone of hope, promise, desire, but also fear. It thrives on research and imagination, yet proliferates ferociously in fear of the unknown and trauma. Experience has shown that it is unpredictable. As artist and theorist Panayotis Papadimitropoulos reminds us, "Given that trauma is inherently linked to the future, its concept becomes crucial because it imparts a human dimension to an uncertain future. What could be more human than experiencing trauma? And what is more human than perceiving the future as potential trauma—a possible violent disruption of an orderly progression?" We might as well ask ourselves whether the future is also this image of a stranger described by philosopher Julia Kristeva; a strange strangeness that inhabits us, "the hidden face of our identity, the space that ruins our stay." The future is impenetrable and enigmatic, and even if you merely touch it, it transforms itself. Its color is that of the possible and exceeds all measure. It's like an immense expanse in perpetual development, stretching beyond the timeline but without breaking away from it. Without borders or frontiers, this promised immensity is made up of tentacles entangled in a protean and fertile network. The very place of the heterotopia as recognized by Michel Foucault, i.e. an infinite and infinitely open space "the greatest reserve of imagination." So very similar to this notion of the garden, wandering and lost; the futures, or gardens, are that "the rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, […]the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. ." Finally, the Future is food for art. It is the real and the unreal, fertile ground for creation. Following the example of François Soulages, a theorist specializing in the aesthetics of photography, who takes the idea of the future far beyond its positivist value, because "it is poetry and not an Excel spreadsheet, it is the expectation of the unexpected and not a forecast, it is the image - with all its fragility and vagueness - and not the diagram." Our union with the future is like our relationship with the real world: curious, innovative, ambivalent, that place between hope and anxiety. Attached to the time that precedes it yet standing on its mighty sovereignty, the future is above all plural and human. Shaping it together means recognizing that a single word is not enough to define us, and that the constant search for an evolving pluralist identity is the only way to build a shared future. Sophie Fardella, Artiste and co-founder of 3Portes Gallery.

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