NEON presents this year’s NEON City Project and the installation Athens Dies In Dreams At Sunrise by artist Alexandros Tzannis at the Old Quarry on Philopappos Hill (map) curated by Galini Noti.

The installation is taking place in collaboration with Green Athens | National Garden – Acropolis Hills, an entity of the City of Athens which manages the natural landscape and historical character of the National Garden and the archaeological site of the Western Acropolis Hills.

NEON City Project  is an initiative conceived and commissioned by NEON to a Greek artist for the creation of a new work to be exhibited in a public space for a specific time period. The aim of the programme that has been running since 2014, is to activate public and historical places through contemporary art, contributing to the interaction of art, society and the city.

Athens Dies In Dreams At Sunrise by Alexandros Tzannis takes place in the old Quarry on the Philopappos Hill southern slope. Architects Bouki Babalou-Noukaki and Antonis Noukakis designed an infrastructure for outdoor sculpture exhibitions on this site as part of the unification of the archaeological sites of Athens in 2003. They created an open structure, a space intended to host art and people, which ultimately was never used for its original purpose. The structure is anchored in the rock and Tzannis’s sculpture attaches itself to it, subconsciously reactivating its original function as a space for outdoor sculpture exhibitions.

Curator Galini Noti notes: “Alexandros Tzannis’ work focuses on the city—on the layers of materials and histories that form this heterogeneous entity. The urban environment is constantly evolving, and his works explore these mutations. They behave like living organisms: growing and adapting to the spaces they inhabit while transforming them. A central aspect of his practice relates to the parasite—an organism that lives in another organism and nourishes itself from it.”

The base of the sculpture encases sunken sweatshirts, a reference to rave culture and the parties of the 1990s. Some of these parties took place in the quarry on Philopappos Hill. It is echoed in the frozen clothes, held in a frame that seems fluid but has solidified.

The ideal time to view the work is at night. The mining of materials from the earth – the metal of the sculpture and the stone that shapes the surrounding space – encompass acts of extraction, human labour, bodily movement shifting from repetitive mechanical action to dance at a party under electric light that both reveals and conceals.

The exhibition’s title Athens Dies In Dreams At Sunrise takes us to the end of the party at dawn, to the end of the dream upon awakening.