NEON participates in OpenWalkAthens (OWA) organized by atenistas. This walk intends to help Athenians discover hidden and unknown parts of the city and its people. The 9th consecutive OWA highlights locations in the center of the city that we walk by every day but may never have been made aware of the treasures that are hidden within them, in their basements and on their rooftops.

The neoclassical residence of Kaplanon, constructed in 1891 is the last remaining buildings of its kind in Athens. It was first occupied by Pavlos Kountouriotis, an admiral who later became the first President of the Second Hellenic Republic. At the start of the twentieth century, the residence was acquired by the Zouzoula family, when the ground floor became the political office of Apostolos Zouzoulas. During the same time, his spouce Eleni Zouzoula-Kanellopoulos, the first female author of children’s books in Greece, established a literary salon in the residence. This way the residence became a central meeting point for politicians in a period of great historical significance between the 1910s and the 1920s as well as literary figures, poets, painters and intellectuals that defined with their work the culture of the time in Athens. During the Metaxa regime, before the Second World War, it was transformed into a residence for female students ‘O Oikos tis Foititrias’.

NEON City Project 2017 activates the historical residence at Kaplanon 11 with Kostis Velonis’s exhibition A Puppet Sun, curated by Vassilis Oikonomopoulos. The artist draws inspiration from the one-hundred-year-old building for an exhibition that responds to its history, architecture and position in the heart of the city.