We live between reality and illusion. Plásmata 3, the major exhibition of the Onassis Cultural Centre at the Pedion tou Areos, invites you to a world where the boundaries of reality and illusion are lost and the everyday is transformed into something magical. For 20 days, Pedion tou Areos will host 25 works by Greek and international artists, spreading discreetly in the public space, like a dream, and conversing with our everyday life, giving space to the analog, the physical and the imaginary.

The surrealist element is not only found in the works of the exhibition; it is inherent in the space itself. A park that looks natural but is constructed; a place that reveals itself as a jungle and hides itself as a collective sanctuary of our dreams – a setting that is constantly transforming.

Among hybrid works, many of which belong to the Onassis Foundation Collection, strange totems charged with hints of spiritualism, mythical animals, ancient pillar-cushions where you can lie down fearlessly without pain, monuments made of broken marble from Athenian sidewalks, bodies that you don’t know if they fall into the void or if they ascend to the sky from a staircase leading to nowhere, glass flowers illuminated by the power of the embrace of two people, amazons on machines, shells that rotate endlessly and through which drops can be heard flowing, familiar and open creatures that emerge from the park’s flowerbeds – Plásmata 3 make up an experience of imagination and wandering.

Plásmata 3 does not separate art into digital and analogue. Instead, they highlight its natural continuity in time: from shadow theatre to projection mapping, from painting to film, from video art to today’s digital and post-digital expression.

Technology is presented not as an end in itself, but as a tool. Artists do not obey artificial intelligence: they use it, transform it, subvert it, overcome it. Using their imagination as their main weapon, they create new narratives that do not submit to algorithms, but question them, reinvent them, drive them mad.

Plásmata 3 is an invitation to play, an invitation to look at the world around us differently. As in David Lynch’s cinema, the uncanny springs from the familiar and the dreamlike seems like a memory. What is the Ministry of Anarchaeology? Is that owl next to the statue of Athena really moving? What is a flock of sheep from Lebanon doing in the Field? Can the Spirit of the Park bring us together? Do golden Datsuns come from the sky? Do the shells sing? Would you like to be a bat?

Inside the Pedion tou Areos you will see creatures that you are not sure if they are real or out of a fairy tale, a painting by Goya or your childhood dreams.

The Plásmata 3 this year are weird. But also adorable. Tender and intimate. They make you wonder: Do they exist? Did they exist? Will there be? And maybe that doesn’t matter so much after all. Come to Plásmata 3 to play, without thinking about what’s normal and what’s not. No need for a ticket. Only imagination.