INSPIRE PROJECT 2025:
THE RETURN
The longing, the violent expatriation and the demand for return, while they should have been placed as issues in the past, they are paradoxically becoming increasingly topical. This year’s Inspire Project 2025 which is hosted in MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art (TIF-Helexpo premises), from 11 April until 1 June 2025, revolves around the theme of the Return, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Turkish invasion in Cyprus in 1974. It extends, however, to the intergenerational trauma of ‘longing’, of lost homeland and home, of forced displacement and migration, but also to the futuristic imagination around what has been lost but is constantly sought.
«Spare Parts»
Text editor Nancy Kamargianni :
When time freezes, then comes the faint memory of a person, a place, every issue that is preserved in memory through the remnants of the past. Social and political issues, such as the expatriation of groups, the trauma of nostalgia, the concept of lived trauma, leave behind stories; and the experience of time and memory, in the context of the public sphere, takes on particular significance. This title highlights the importance of what remains or is left behind when people, communities, or cultures are forced to leave or lose their connection.
Public space is constituted by the social rules
established by human groups through coexistence.
Objects can create space, but
space continues to exist even if the objects
are moved. Furthermore, based on public art that
arises from empirical memory, emphasis is placed on the relationship
between the public and the visual work, which explores the urban
landscape and the possible relationships between social groups.
The absence of people from abandoned or enclosed spaces, where human activity has frozen, brings to the fore the feeling of the unfamiliar. Public space carries a collective experiential memory and is directly linked to time. The experience of time and
memory interacts with space and the changes that occur within it. Places are not neutral; they often carry tensions, silences, and absences. The urban environment functions as a carrier of memory, where traces of the past are incorporated into the present, thus creating «places of memory.»
collage digital print on double-sided cardboard 5cm, 165 x 120 cm, 2025
MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, April, 11, 2025 – June, 1, 2025
OTTO 