CULTURE AND BIODIVERSITY

A co-organization of the Eliopoulos Museum, Filiatra-Messinia & Herakleidon Museum. 

Under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture.

The Eliopoulos Museum and the Herakleidon Museum jointly organize multi-thematic actions and events that aim to inform, raise awareness and activate the residents of the area in matters of the environment, ecology, climate crisis and biodiversity protection. 

Special emphasis placed on school-aged children, the reason why actions have been designed with an exclusively educational character.

Following the slogan “Think globally, act locally”, we present the human question of intervention in nature through a problem that it is not ours, in the sense of the city, of the region or our country, although it happens in a wider neighborhood in which we have geographical and historical references as people and as a Mediterranean country. Through a visual exhibition and two video projections, the viewer becomes a participant in the continuous degradation and shrinking of the Dead Sea and the world’s unique ecosystem connected to it. Thalassini Douma intervenes in her own photographic material and turns it into a pulsating visual work that hurts the viewer, just as man hurts his environment and the planet. Exhibition title: Below Sea Level. 

All the actions first reduce the problem of environmental degradation from general to local, make the connections with the climate crisis, to finally bring them to the measures of our neighborhood, to connect it with the problems that concern the Ionian Coasts of the Peloponnese. Finally, there is a focus and enlargement of issues related to the sustainability of Agricultural Production and the intangible or no material cultural heritage that is connected to it, the need to preserve biodiversity with references to the historical continuity from the time of Nestor until today. 

No one forgets that the vine and the olive tree have been cultivated in this place since the time of the Homeric stories, that the sea lilies that still grow on the sandy beaches of the area once adorned the walls of the palaces. No one forgets that this place is blessed with an unsurpassed wealth of biodiversity. 

 To the extent that the future belongs to the children, the actions belong to them. Accepting our debt to them and to the future, we organize environmental education programs of storytelling, reading, recognizing problems , and taking initiatives aimed at energizing the youth who will in turn “impose” ethics and practices on the generations from which they will take the baton. The older children, the middle and the high school classes, are invited to create their own short film. Finally, to close the quarter and the events, a concert is organized in the atrium of the Eliopoulos Museum. 

Duration of actions: October 6, 2023 – January 7, 2024 

Eliopoulos Museum, Zacharianon 11, Filiatra.