Publication Title: Pope.L: Campaign
Editor: Dieter Roelstraete
Publisher: Mousse Publishing
Language: English
Date: 2019
Location: Milan
This book follows a three-part collaboration between artist Pope.L and curator Dieter Roelstraete on connectedness, home, migration, and art’s relationship to knowledge. It began with Whispering Campaign for documenta 14 in 2016, a large-scale sound installation in Athens and Kassel that broadcast whispered reflections on borders and nationhood. The second chapter took shape at the University of Chicago in Brown People Are the Wrens in the Parking Lot, a multifaceted exhibition and public program responding to debates on race, immigration, and inequality in the US. The final chapter was the course Art and Knowledge, co-taught by Pope.L and Roelstraete, which asked students to reflect on art’s uncertain relationship to knowledge.
My contribution to the publication is a diary-text that follows Pope.L through the various Athens sites of Whispering Campaign, offering a grounded account of how the work unfolded in my city of origin. Written from close observation and lived proximity, the text traces the installation’s movement through Athens while reflecting on the city as a space where myth, migration, crisis, and memory converge. In doing so, it documents not only the development of the project on the ground, but also the particular political and emotional resonance it acquired within the Athenian context.
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