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THEBES 2015
“The unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence,” wrote Italo Calvino in his masterpiece Invisible Cities.
The same way, in the case of the city of Thebes, many other cities of different nature, real-historical, conscious, mnemonic, mythological, and sociological cities, are hidden within the current one, thus giving a new interpretation to the plural of the city's name Thebes, Ai Thivai, for which many approaches have been arised, but its origin remains unknown.
The city's topography is impregnated with its own existence's foundations, while the modern city oversubscribes them through an incoherent system of amporphous shapes, movements and directions, without being sprout of its roots, disrupting this way the continuity of 4500 years of life.
Only a-spot, the modern city allows the hidden ones to emerge in a stranded way, diminishing their cultural, aesthetical and didactical value, which are being impressed degraded in the collective unconscious, which in its turn will lead them in oblivion. This city with its formless identity creates and is created by the subject-consumer diallectically.
The Sphinx 2015 project attempts to strengthen the structural elements of Thebes' hidden cities, to emerge them to the surface and unite them with the current one, and through the new united body of the city which will be created, the transcedental meaning, the noema, will appear, targeting to raise awareness of the citizens, to redefine their identity, and to transform them from subjects-consumers to subjects-creators, who will receive this noema, and will introduce it poetically as a definisive term in the spatio-linguistic system of the future.
“Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the name of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished.
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song,
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.”
― Bertolt Brecht