PROJECT NERO, MELD brings Athens, Greece to the center-stage of international dialogue: departing from a specific problem to the pollution and decay of the city’s three rivers, meld will tackle the universal problem surrounding water.

 

We believe this art project will bring people together whose paths may never have crossed prior to their participation, by building an experimental and virtual space where people can learn to co-exist. When art melds into the public arena in unexpected ways, it has the power to encourage public action and unite diverse echelons of society to exchange in a global dialogue. By opening new doors for participation, it will create greater awareness, educate and inspire creative solutions to reduce the damaging consequences of climate change.

 

The project’s exposure will generate new perceptions and interest towards the country and through its involvement, and we hope that Greece will become a “thinking forward country” setting an example for others to follow.

Within his animation-projects, German Artist, Alexander Schellow, has developed his drawing practice as an instrument to observe everyday forms of involuntary perception and memory. In the frame of a series of projects initiated by MELD, this strategy is used as a tool to focus on the phenomenon of water and more precisely, a specific daily perception within different specific contexts.

 

Following the first Berlin-version, WASSER_I_11/2009, the second part of the filmic research takes place in Athens, Greece. More precisely, Streaming focuses on the Kifissos River, which structurally builds, metaphorically speaking, its line of narration. Imagine: What if some Athenians would still say: let’s meet on the other side of the river. The street shown on a map would be called ‘Kifissou.’ A motorway. Not a river. When we set out, we were intrigued by the existence, or more accurately the non-existence, of the river. For the elders, the river is still engraved in their minds as a dramatic memory and experience – a river that at its essence was a sacred source of inspiration for economic, social and cultural development has now become a social and physical border. For the younger generation, the river has transformed into a geographical reference point, only to be reminded of its existence during annual floods, but has otherwise vanished from their collective memory.

In conjunction with the Athens Olympics in 2004, the construction of the Kifissias freeway, which began in the 1970s, was finally completed. As a result, the Kifissos River, where according to lore ancient Athens was founded and which has historically served as the formative axis of its development, has since been nearly entirely covered within the city perimeter.

 

This process is strongly interlinked with a research by drawing-reconstruction, focusing on the structural change in perception of the urban riverside, bit by bit caused by the discovered parallel narratives. These stories and maps become the mental foil for walks following the broken line through the city. Later on, reconstructed from memory, the visual surfaces of these walks become documents of a specific inscription. What is known automatically becomes part of what is seen and even more – what is remembered. Conversely the drawings again have been integrated in the continued parallel talks as sort of pulsing devices. A reciprocity of information plays with the idea of a mutual animation.

Nero confronts projections, ideas and utopias by experts from different fields including architecture, history, economics and politics on the past and future of the Kifissos in constellation with testimonies of interlocutors living in different immediate neighborhoods in proximity to “the river” – and combines/activates this in relation to a singular perspective of an outsider