Publication Title: After the Explosion You Still Hear the Light
Editor: 3 137
Publisher: Paraguay Press / 3 137
Language: English / Greek
Date: 2023
Graphic Design: Panos Papanagiotou
Location: Paris
After the Explosion You Still Hear the Light grew out of the exhibition and related events of the same title, evolving into a seven-year research project and informal working group with numerous contributors—one of the most ambitious initiatives undertaken by the artist-run space 3 137. Focusing on the artistic practices, groups, and spaces of 1970s Greece, the project explored the still largely underexamined affinities between that generation and contemporary artistic production in Greece. At the same time, it documented and fostered intergenerational encounters among artists, historians, critics, theorists, and cultural producers who have helped shape local artistic life over the past sixty years.
My contribution to the volume was an introductory text tracing the project’s emergence at a moment when questions of local art history, archives, and cultural memory had become especially urgent. In it, I sought to outline how we revisited this specific period and to examine how Greek art has been positioned within broader art-historical narratives, as well as how its institutional gaps might be addressed today. The resulting book became, for all of us involved, an auto-historiographical project that turns to the past in order to better understand its influence on Greece’s contemporary cultural and institutional landscape. At its core, it is an effort to preserve voices, practices, and archives that were in danger of disappearing, while opening space for new readings of Greece’s recent artistic past.
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