DALL’ACROPOLI AL PIREO

Off-site project

Artist: Anna Valeria Borsari
Installation date: 27.11.2022
Location: Dimofontos 126, 118 52 Athens

Dall’Acropoli al Pireo (From Acropolis to Piraeus) is a site-specific installation by Anna Valeria Borsari.
The installation consists of an oil painting hanging on the remaining wall of the first floor of a demolished building at 126 Dimofontos street in the district of Petralona in Athens. The location of the work responds to the artist’s interest in the relationship between the archaeological site of the Acropolis and the port of Piraeus, both symbols of the dissemination of ancient Greek culture and the country’s modern tourist industry.
The timeless sea, which Borsari painted for the purposes of this intervention, aims to contrast the perpetual nature with the ephemerality of human constructions. The seascape, made with materials unsuitable for outdoor use, will either decompose or disappear unpredictably.
With this new intervention, Anna Valeria Borsari continues her long-standing research that is addressing the boundaries between private and public, interior and exterior, as well as the anonymity of the artistic gesture and the poetic aspect of decay as an inevitable condition for all human creations.
Dall’Acropoli al Pireo is the artist’s first site-specific installation outside Italy.

Anna Valeria Borsari (1943, Bazzano, Italy) lives and works in Milan. She studied Literature and Philosophy at the University of Bologna, where, between 1970 and 1995, she taught Romance Philology. In her practice, she employs a variety of media including text, painting, sculpture, video and photography. Since the early 1980s, Borsari has been creating large-scale ephemeral installations and site-specific artworks that survive solely through their photographic documentation.

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