The role of art as a field of social inquiry and as an occasion for examining issues of socio-political content has special characteristics and parameters that lead to public awareness.

When it takes place in the public sphere, addressing global challenges passes through the prism of social and artistic awareness and art becomes unparalleled in building creative partnerships and societies.

The International Sculpture Symposium on “1922-2022, Refugees”, which was completed at the end of June in the South Park of Patras by the Municipal Library – Cultural Organization of the Municipality of Patras, honoring the memory of the sculptor Dionysis Gerolymatos, is a special municipal initiative of social awakening, exploration and awareness.

The President of the Cultural Organization Katerina Geropanagioti in her address to the Days of Art said:

“For one month, ten artists from Greece & abroad (Albania, Armenia, Syria & Turkey ) created works that are now an asset in our region. Today they are exhibited around the Fish Market (South Park) as an outdoor sculpture gallery.

During the symposium there was a large number of visitors and a keen interest from the public in the artists and their creations. Also, organized visits by the Cultural Organization were planned by our city’s collectives.

The process of creating the works was open and took place in front of the eyes of the spectators-residents. Practically, it was given the opportunity to see live how a sculpture work is created and at the same time to discuss the role of sculpture in highlighting social problems, such as refugees. The art of sculpture, an art with a long history in Greece, an art that is lost in the depths of millennia, in recent years has been hit by the economic crisis more than all other visual arts.”

The themes that the viewer encounters, in relation to the refugee drama, are broad and complex.

The family drama of displacement is represented in a dynamic kinetic relief composition with elements from folk iconography in the work Fugue by Christos Tsoublekas.

Similarly, Christos Valera’s work “The Caravan” is inspired by the families that were uprooted and the boats that were the means of salvation for these people, but the work Separation by Philip Angelos Varela is a punch to the stomach. It depicts the moment when the mother-woman and infant are separated from the father-man, who is left behind to serve on the merciless war front. The inspiration came from contemporary and painful images from Ukraine

Works by artists participating in the park at the Fish Market transform pain and harsh migration into a symbolic and abstract dimension. In “The Grids”, Chaushi Besim depicts through the particular dynamics of marble the difficulty of entrapment and imprisonment in war. And the abstract forms of Panagiotis Lambrou in “Path” create a gateway – a border of souls.

Particularly symbolic in conceptual terms is the “Circle of Life / Refugee” by Seljuk Yilmaz. The circle is a geometric symbol for earth and life is destroyed at one point by fragments of roots and wings, broken into the circular structure. And alexander m. pfaff’s work, I Amy, 2022, uses another geometric archetype, the cube, demonstrating the relationship of the part to the whole, the need for the coexistence of the whole

‘An eternal archetypal symbol, the house, is also elaborated by Vasilis Vasili in the work “The House of Uncle Thomas”, a geometric intervention inside the marble volume with references to spaces of memory and the past.

Aktham Abdulhamid in ‘A letter from the earth to the sky’ symbolically connects the fate and existence of man with perpetuity thanks to the contemplation of the sky, while the last work installed in Gagik Altunyan Park entitled “Prayer” is a special symbolic representation of the concept of prayer which leaves in a monumental way, free to the spirit of the viewer to think about the dimension of prayer and to process it based on his subjectivity.

In the open-air sculpture gallery “Ichthioskala” of the Municipality of Patras, art met public opinion, made every citizen an active participant in a social condition, the condition of uprooting, which has been traumatizing peoples for centuries. Through the dynamic artistic initiative and integration, the municipal authority was defined with an active role for art and culture. A project that must be reflected and activated in every authority and institution with public authority and discourse.

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