(2025)
Soil Epigraph is a private collection of anonymous photographs (1890-1980) foraged to exist in counterpoint to monolithic visual representations of Greece. Fragmented, dissonant imagery sourced in Athens is coalesced with a literary overture, forming architectures of reference that can be acknowledged as a whole. The archive gives voice to a country being built, exhumed by its own breath in the spatial weight of migration, infrastructure, war and conflict, the family unit, labor, and ecclesiastical foundations. Enacted through monthly releases, Soil Epigraph constructs latitudes to traverse spaces between presence and absence. Choreographing the unknown into an image of the wild cyclamen bending the soil and splitting an impenetrable bedrock – this is the essence of Soil Epigraph.
The first collection, Moon Bullet, launches on Athens Design Forum’s fourth anniversary, September 30th, 2025, on the independent Soil Epigraph platform designed by MÁTI GREY.
Soil Epigraph will form a core part of Athens Design Forum, a Greek non-profit organization founded in 2021 that advocates for overlooked and generative design histories interwoven with global labor and migration patterns. Curatorial programming prioritizes photography and film as integral, critical methodologies to decipher design’s social role.
Collections and Exhibitions Curator: Katerína Papanikolopoulos
With gratitude to the publishing houses of Kedros and Gutenberg for granting the rights to reproduce selections from the works of Yiannis Ritsos, Fernando Pessoa, and Octavio Paz.
@soilepigraph
contact: info@athensdesignforum.com
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