The Finnish Institute at Athens is pleased to announce the public opening of Jenny Marketou’s artwork Fairground of Earthed Stories, created for the Institute’s garden.
Inspired by Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s Animal Architecture (Eläinten arkkitehtuuri) and by the Finnish Institute’s archaeological research and excavations in Thessaly, the work invites us to explore soil not simply as a material but as a living archive: a carrier of traces of habitation, cultivation, water, catastrophe, regeneration, and deep time.
After the opening, the sculpture will remain in the garden, transforming through its encounters with rain, heat, roots, microorganisms, insects, birds, and plants. It will crack, weather, erode, accumulate traces, and gradually become entangled with its surroundings.
Fairground of Earthed Stories imagines the sculpture also as a future archaeological object. Its strange and deliberately ambiguous form might one day appear as a relic excavated from a civilization that has not yet existed – a fragment of an unknown culture, a ruin, a dwelling, or perhaps a shelter made for other-than-human beings. Its purpose remains deliberately open.
Fairground of Earthed Stories extends Marketou’s previous public and site-responsive works, including Rivering, The Hatchery, and Folly for Songs for FUNK Kinships: A Pollinator for Far Futures. While these works have explored forms of multispecies encounter, refuge, and collective care, the new sculpture takes another step: the artwork itself becomes a participant in an evolving ecosystem.
