So, from afar, we meet halfway

The exhibition brings together Italian and Greek artists from different generations, many of whom have lived, studied, or worked in both cultural contexts. Their works convey the complexity of this ongoing encounter, rooted in direct experience and explored through different perspectives, in which memory, landscape, material culture, travel, and mobility become tools for rereading a shared history. The exhibition is structured around five thematic sections. The first reflects on the survival of images, bringing myth, nature, and landscape into dialogue through the practices of Valentina Bartolini, Giovanna Caimmi, and Marta Roberti. The second focuses on the memory of places, showing how monuments, architecture, artefacts, and everyday practices preserve traces of a history shaped by the circulation of techniques, objects, and knowledge, as explored in the works of Katerina Botsari and Giuseppe De Mattia. The third section considers the Mediterranean as a space of passage. Eva Marisaldi, Marcella Vanzo, and the duo Agata Ferrari Bravo & Thomas Saccuman approach the theme of travel from different perspectives, considering it as an experience of knowledge, connection, and mobility, but also as a space in which the profound inequalities that continue to traverse the sea emerge. The fourth section addresses the transformation of maritime routes from commercial pathways into migration routes and, ultimately, tourist itineraries, as explored through the works of Elena Chantzis and Vasilis Papageorgiou. On the one hand, the affective memory of the relationships that connected Italy and Greece throughout the twentieth century resurfaces, in dialogue with the very space of the Italian Cultural Institute in Athens; on the other, the works offer a reflection on the economic and social transformations reshaping the Mediterranean landscape, questioning the relationship between tourism, public space, and everyday life. The exhibition concludes with artists who have chosen to live and work between Italy and Greece. The practices of Lucia Bricco, Giovanni Copelli, and Stef Kamaris show how the dialogue between the two countries is not simply a theme, but a concrete condition of artistic practice. Through experiences of education, residency, and professional activity, their works convey an ongoing encounter between different languages, cultures, and imaginaries, transforming this relationship into a space for experimentation and research. Painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, performance, and participatory practices thus articulate an encounter between Italy and Greece that moves beyond stereotypical representations. The works demonstrate how images, places, practices, and biographies continue to intertwine, shaping a shared history that belongs not only to the past but continues to evolve and renew itself in the present.