In one of the most attractive European cities for activists and artists alike, the Festival will bring together thinkers, creatives and the local population to create a collective European reflection on the sustainable development of the city. Parks will turn into meeting spots to debate a common future.
The Athens Garden Festival aims to provide a platform and give a unique opportunity to every citizen to take possession of the city’s gardens and open spaces in order to share views, knowledge and fight stereotypes through art and cultures (outdoors reading culture, dance, music) and the discovery of innovative solutions for local and European issues linked to our future of living (social values and inclusion, digital transition, architecture, sustainability).
Thanks to the collaboration with many local partners and European guests, the Athens Garden Festival will be an occasion to bring together different communities in the city around transgenerational places used as spaces of dialogue, and to ensure skills transfer, intercultural exchanges as well as capacity building through workshops and debates.
All events are free, some require registration. Check the full programme and other conditions on the official Athens Garden Festival webpage and Facebook page.
The poet and critic Ján Gavura has coined the phrase “oko kameramanky” (camerawoman’s eye), referring to her work as a lecturer on film. This is slightly misleading for Anglophone readers for whom Isherwood’s “I am a camera” belongs to another era of realism in writing. Mária is not a realist in that sense at all. Certainly there is an ability to switch visual perspectives in the space of a single poem, to zoom in and out. In “Threatened Species,” the sequence opens with a view from space: “The view from above doesn’t belong to a god / but a satellite”; but by section ten we have a microscopic viewpoint: “we examine the skin on faces, / maps of blood vessels, craters for cells.” There is also a merging of the self with the environment; human beings in Mária’s poems are also animals and not separated from the environment. Often in her poetry the body becomes both exterior and interior landscape, a juxtaposition of macroscopic and microscopic vision akin to the hermetic doctrine of “as above, so below.” I read Mária’s poetry with same excitement that I first read the English Metaphysicals many years ago.