Unearthed Frequencies (working title) will be presented as part of the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, South India, and explores the transformation of Kochi from the ancient port of Muziris, a center of the spice trade and site of colonial exploitation, into a contemporary digital hub connected to the world through submarine internet cables. Kochi’s case highlights the continuities between colonial telegraph networks, trade routes, and today’s digital infrastructures, demonstrating that mechanisms of power shift in form but do not disappear.
The project is prompted by the recent retirement of SEA-ME-WE3, one of the world’s largest submarine cable systems, which had a landing point in Kochi. Its remains stay submerged as material traces of our digital present, where technological matter intersects with geological and archaeological strata.
The work approaches excavation both as a scientific practice and as a metaphor for uncovering invisible infrastructures, overlooked histories, and buried relations of power. Through the installation, the region’s history is reconfigured: materiality itself becomes a medium for narrating a shared temporality, where multiple histories intersect and coexist, opening a dialogue on the future of the digital age through the archaeological traces of the present.
Visual Reference, Unearthed frequencies, Athina Koumparouli, 2025
Athina Koumparouli is a visual artist and art conservator based in Athens. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, including: Elefsina 2023 – European Capital of Culture, Paxos Biennale 2024, In Memory of Memory (2023, Paris), This Current Between Us (2022, Athens), Outraged by Pleasure (2023, Athens), The Poem Returns as an Echo (2024, Athens), The Symbiocene Forest at BioArt Laboratories (2019, Eindhoven), Dutch Design Week (2019, Eindhoven). She has participated in artist residencies in Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Greece. In 2025, she presented her first solo exhibition at a.antonopoulou.art gallery in Athens. In December 2025, she will participate at the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (Kerala, South India). She received the ARTWORKS fellowship by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation in 2022. In 2022 and 2023, in collaboration with the University of Ferrara and with the support of the Culture Moves Europe program, she developed an artistic project at an active excavation site on the Appian Way (Rome). Her artistic practice emerges through a multidisciplinary research approach focused on sites in transition—such as industrial sites, areas affected by natural disasters, or archaeological excavations. Often employing archaeological methodology as a tool of her artistic process, she explores issues related to different perceptions of the environment and aspects of the environmental crisis, through both present and speculative scenarios.