Papaeti Anna & Pappas Nektarios, New Parthenon (2019)

Written by Anna Papaeti & Nektarios Pappas-

The installation New Parthenon was created by Anna Papaeti and Nektarios Pappas in the context of ‘Iasis’ [Cure] Exhibition curated by TILT in 2019 at Loutraki, Greece. Its title refers to a phrase attributed to politician Panagiotis Kanellopoulos with regard to the infamous detention camps at the island of Makronissos during the (post) civil-war period (1947–1957) in Greece. The work explores official rehabilitation discourses for leftists and communists at the Makronissos camps, which had been deemed as a ‘national sanatorium’ for communists at the time. There, detainees would be cured from the communism bug and would be turned into ‘real Greeks’, through a ‘rehabilitation program’.

Drawing on archival research and interviews with survivors, the work explores the ways in which music was instrumentalized in the detainees’ ‘cure’, which consisted of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and hard labour. The work presents visitors with a dialectic between sonic, sensorial and archival material that unfolds in a tiny room which alludes to a cell.