Sphinx 2015 is an artistic project in the urban and social life of the town of Thebes, where artists specializing in different fields, from all over the world, authors, scientists and the public create by interacting with its mnemonic elements, proposing solutions to “found the city of the future”;  the place we want to live in.   

Project Sphinx 2015 is an ambitious artistic proposal to found a new town on the tracks of one of the most ancient cities of Europe, by transforming the inhabitants’ emotional chart through a vertical dive in space and time, in order to discover the cultural reserve that will constitute the beginning of the creation of a new identity harmonized with dormant ontological – existential conditions. 

The works – proposals attempt to overthrow immobility, complacencies and inertia causing decay to our present; to unify the actions of alert citizens and change, through interactions the future of the town in harmony with its particular topology, a future that offending powers predict as dark. Project Sphinx is centered around the Riddle of Sphinx  which Oedipus solved by answering: “Anthropos”, a term which is an unsolved riddle in itself.

The work is created by artists and citizens both in the real space and virtual website of the town (Internet) and concerns the society itself as well as the town, where multiple artistic, cultural or plainly social events are held in both a coordinated and spontaneous way and interventions are made at the same time and successively in multiple levels in real space and virtually.

The Riddle of the Sphinx re-examines the meaning of the human being through his position in space, time, history, that is, his identity:

a. his far away past with its values, clashes, the civilization he created

b. the present society, current challenges and socio-economic clashes, contemporary cultural flows and fusions (cultural expansion, immigration), the role of technology, communication and Internet, the force of the present political power, genetic science, astrophysics and space exploration, artificial intelligence, artificial conscience etc. 

c. The proposals about the simultanuous presence of present/future/ past in our redefined space-time example. 

The Thebes experiment

The subject of the experiment of Thebes is how an entire town can become an experimental site and take genuine positions on the issues of universal financial – political – social- moral and cognitive crisis.

Ancient Thebes is the ideal place to experiment, through a holistic concept of art, with a mythologically augmented rehabilitation process transforming the actual declining role of the contemporary modern greek town – a town, however, that has an enormous and timeless cultural past (history, myths, art) – in the rapidly changing hybrid world of intense social and cultural interaction.