A Blur of the Real and the Imaginary: Plásmata in Athens

“Are you scared or angry?” asks the voice of a young girl riding a motorcycle through the Greek island of Crete, musing on the fragility and everlasting power of human existence. As she lifts her back leg in a balletic arabesque, she continues her philosophical pondering: “I’m a daughter of a daughter of a daughter of a daughter. I’m a billion years old. I’m too young.” 

The scene is from Greek multidisciplinary artist Efi Gousi’s film Tectonic Riders (2025), showing in Plásmata 3, the third iteration of the digital art festival backed by Onassis Stegi. Inspired by the ancient game of bull vaulting, Gousi’s film plays amidst the verdant landscape of Athen’s Pedion tou Areos Park to a captivating musical composition as the women riders in Gousi’s poetically charged work confront issues of climate change, female identity and the uncertainty of present times. “I wanted to involve the new generation,” says Gousi, “[as] they don’t just have darkness in their arms, they can also bring light. I wanted to empower women and discuss the effects of climate change in a poetic way.”

This mesmerising film bridges past, present and future, the real and the imaginary, with a resounding sense of escapism common to the other 25 hybrid digital and physical works on display in this edition of Plásmata 3, entitled ‘We’ve met before, haven’t we?’. The exhibition, which marks the largest open-air new media art festival in Europe, focuses this year on the nature of post-AI reality and new conditions of experience. The works on view are eerily captivating at times and yet at others wondrously transcendent – signs of the state of rapid change and uncertainty presently impacting everyday reality. From grappling with new advances in technology to the world’s constant political and economic upheaval, the artworks beg the viewer to look beneath the surface in order to come to terms with the thin line between the real and the imaginary. 

“I believe that truth does not necessarily lie in reality,” says Afroditi Panagiotakou, artistic director of the Onassis Foundation. “How we perceive things, how our feelings create the context of what we consider to be true, is something that I think about all the time.” The decision to stage this edition of Plasmata, she emphasises, “wasn’t rational at all”. The title for the exhibition is taken from David Lynch’s movie Lost Highway. “In the world of David Lynch, everything looks very normal, but something is off,” Panagiotakou continues. “It is this off element that gives the magic to an atmosphere. It is a characteristic I have always believed in, it’s what makes things truly interesting.” 

The works in Plásmata, which means ‘creatures’ in Greek, are very much like living beings themselves. The digital and performative elements they incorporate endows them with movement, as if they too were creatures coming alive for passersby to view amid the charming greenery of the park. 

This dimension emerges in Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s video installation Where is my Mind? (2020), part of their projects I Stared at Beauty So Much and Museum Melancholy. Deconstructed ancient Roman sculptures and heads move on and off a large screen to a passionate musical score as the artists seek to honour peoples of the past, present and future, asking “how?” in a time when technology is taking over our everyday life.

The work was shot in in the archaeological museum in Izmir, Turkey, in a room with numerous headless statues. Hadjithomas and Joreige recall how, as they filmed, they felt that the sculptures were relaying them a message about the fragility and resistance of art and the fragility, resistance and persistence of history. “They seemed to be heroes and heroines, but they had lost their faces in their own identity,” explains Hadjithomas. “We remembered those faces during Covid, because we had this impression that we were always giving away our data, our identity to algorithms. We began to ask ourselves how we can continue to think freely, poetically and politically?”.

The artists included a verse from a poem by the Greek poet George Seferis. 

“What history survives without a body?
“They told us you’ll conquer when you surrender.
We surrendered and found ashes.
They told us you’ll conquer when you love.
We loved and found ashes.
[…]
We found ashes. It remains to recuperate our life, now that we’ve nothing left.”

With these lines, Hadjithomas and Joreige connected with their beloved city of Beirut, which has fallen to ashes countless times in its history. The poignant work with its rotating images of ancient headless statues, transfixing the viewer in a moment of awe and wonder, aims to address “what is left from the past and our history because we need also to understand it. We are always interested in historical traces and how we face history, as well as in what keeps the stresses from the past in our imagination.” 

In Ziad Antar’s video Metronome (2024) a more playful tackling of the absurdities of everyday life comes to life in a sequence of musical videos using children’s instruments that are directed and synchronised by the sound of a metronome. “The idea was to [foster] memories of when we were young or sounds that we used to hear on a daily basis,” the artist explains. “They can be humanistic or violent, but the idea is that the work is based in reality while generating a sort of illusion.”

For visitors to Pedion tou Areos, whether visiting for a moment in nature or to view the art in Plásmata 3, a dream-like, otherworldly ambiance awaits. The festival strives to make art speak in a public space and it succeeds in doing so. It is about “how art can speak and offer us an escape from the craziness of this world, where everyone’s more anxious, crazy and losing their minds over politics and technology,” says Antar. “So let’s put art in a park”.

Visitors will confront not just the melancholic confusion that plagues contemporary existence but also beautiful bursts of exaltation as artists create to escape from the madness of our world. The artworks, which are seamlessly curated within the various areas of the park, prove that reality and truth begin in many ways with ourselves and with our perception of what is true. 

Plásmata 3: We’ve met before, haven’t we? runs until 15 June