[OPEN] CALL#2 THESSALONIKI

Artists: Panagiotis Voulgaris, Dimitra Maltabe, Lea Petrou. Participating artists in Thessaloniki event: Eleni Theofilaktou, Christos Christou

Aristotelous axis defines the radical change of the city, urban and architectural, after the fire in 1917. At the same time, it marks the transition of the city from the Ottoman and multinational past to a national era, with the revival of a New Byzantine rhythm that characterizes the architectural form of the buildings surrounding Aristotelous square.
Call #2 Thessaloniki will start at the north end of Aristotelous axis, namely the section of Agios Dimitrios- Kassandrou where Ernest Hebrard had planned a prestigious monument, the "Temple of Victory", designed with step gardens in amphitheatrical layout, overlooking the city and the sea, which was never realized. In its place, a vacant space has emerged above the temple of Agios Dimitrios, in the form of a parking space surrounded by anonymous apartment buildings, a product of a private construction project that mainly prevailed in the country after Second World War. This transition from the organized urban planning to a random and useless space, represent the image of post-war development of the form of the Greek city. It describes as well, our relationship with the public space and the green areas.

[Open] Call # 2 Thessaloniki on a reverse route, depicts the different phases of the area of the Victory monument in the era before the fire, with the small houses built side by side, the design of the magnificent monument with its gardens, and the space left of today. The outline of the homes before the destruction, which have been places of privacy, are becoming a potential garden and, by extension, an open public space that develops along the axis and within a kilometer that it occupies. These variable points following the vertical path of the axis are defined by cartons that symbolically reflect the transition from home to garden, from private to public. They became a working space where soil from the wider area is packed with wildflower seeds to a hundred specially designed sachets for action, symbolizing the years of the fire that changed the shape of the city and are offered to its citizens. At the same time, the artists members of the action plant a number of these seeds at different points around the public spaces on either side of the axis. It is an organic descent to the central axis of the city and an attempt to redefine its past, a call for the creation of Hebrard's unrealized gardens, from the palm of our hand, to the uncovered apartment block, to the balconies, to the empty plot of the neighborhood.

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