Eros & Thanatos, Real Estate was an art exhibition and a public cultural program featuring site-specific installations by Spanish and Greek artists. It explored the duality of love and death and the potential of the emotions that exist in liminal spaces as opposed to the distractions of the globalised world. In doing so, it aimed to transcend duality while encompassing some eternal identity issues in Greece and Spain.
The show took inspiration from romantic poet José Cadalso and his tragic act of digging up the body of his beloved Maria Ignacia Ibáñez only to see it dead once more. In it, the themes of Eros (love) and Thanatos (death) symbolise respectively the artistic drive and the ruined suffocation of Mediterranean cities.
The exhibition was conceived as a fictional real estate empire that has a poppy on its logo, a flower that represents both desire and intoxication. Eros and Thanatos's first enterprise was the reactivation of Ioanna and Tony Spiteris's old house in the Athenian area of Kypseli. For a period of three weeks it connected with the diverse community across this neighbourhood in order to explore the socio-magical effects of artistic creation, with the hope — and the expectation — that art has the potential to transform, like a miracle, depressed ruins into an object of love.
Co-organised by: Instituto Cervantes Atenas, Atelier Cycladon 8
Coordination assistant: Sotiria Smirnaiou
OPENING: 30th January 2020, 20.00 h
ON VIEW: 30th January - 19th February 2020
Atelier Cycladon 8, Kykladon, Kypseli, 113 61, Athens
