Touching Landscapes takes as a starting point artist’s Margaret Raspé’s (1933-2023) most unexplored body of work which relates to Greece and its landscape of the 1970s and 1980s, approaching it as a kernel that reveals realities relating to ecology, history, and tradition. Through a research trip to Raspé’s summer home on the island of Karpathos, Danai Giannoglou and Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou will delve into the legacy of this untapped material and the ways it resonates with contemporary Greek landscapes. Raspé’s engagement with imperceptible processes of nature, and with nature itself as a medium, will enter into dialogue with contemporary artistic practices.
The project takes shape with two new commissions to Greek and international artists who grapple with themes of energy, land and landscapes across time and geographies as well as with Raspé’s own oeuvre from that period.
Touching Landscapes is an exhibition and a negotiation into the archive of ISET (Contemporary Greek Art Institute).
Margaret Raspé, Reflektionen über Sonne, Wasser, Erde und Wind (Karpathos), 1987, colored photograph, Courtesy of the estate of Margaret Raspé and Galerie Molitor, Berlin
Danai Giannoglou is a curator, writer and editor currently living and working independently between Athens and Amsterdam. She is the co-founder and curator of Enterprise Projects, a project space in Athens that has been functioning independently and periodically since September 2015, and the editor of Enterprise Projects Journal, a publishing initiative by Enterprise Projects in the form of a bilingual online publication of newly commissioned theoretical and research essays. She has held curatorial positions at de Appel, Amsterdam and served as the exhibitions archive coordinator at Deste Foundation, Athens. She is currently a contributor to the Metropolis M magazine. Danai participated in the de Appel Curatorial Programme 2019/20, Amsterdam and previously studied Theory and History of Art at the Athens School of Fine Arts, as well as Cultural Management and Curating at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris. She is a recipient of the Onassis AiR Emergency Fellowship 19/20, the Onassis AiR Tailor-Made Fellowship 2022, the 2nd SNF Artist Fellowship Program (Curating), as well as the inaugural ArcAthens NOLA/NYCBX Research Fellowship in 2023. Her curatorial practice focuses on languages and landscapes using visual art and poetry as vehicles for their exploration. At the same time she researches the history, legacy and stakes of independent art spaces and practices.
Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou is an art historian and curator, currently a research fellow (VENI) and lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her interdisciplinary scholarship, at the intersection of art and science history and the environmental humanities, centers on nuclear aesthetics and engages material histories of art and the environment, toxicity, antinuclear activism and feminist discourses. She obtained her PhD from the École des hautes en sciences sociales, Paris (2021), supported by an Onassis foundation scholarship, entitled Dwelling, Extracting, Burying: Nuclear Imaginaries in Contemporary Art (1970-2020). In 2022–23 she was a research fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, RWTH Aachen University. She is the scientific advisor of Atomic Age. Artists Grappling with History (Musée d’art Moderne, Paris, 2024–25); CCCB Barcelona, 2026), and in 2024 she curated the group exhibition …that creeps from the earth (2024) at Tavros, Athens. Currently she is co-editing the volume Toxic Materialities: Exposure and Pollution in Art Making Across Histories and Geographies (Brill, forthcoming). Her research and curatorial work has been supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Goulandris Foundation, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.