Of Echoes and Mirrors

Echoes in the Mediterranean never end. They perpetuate and enhance.
At the center of the exhibition is the work of Wilhelm von Gloeden, presented for the first time in Greece. His photographs, often seen through a limited historical or merely erotic lens, are recontextualized within the broader weave of Mediterranean queer heritage—where aesthetics, body, and myth interlace.
Conceived as a plural and stratified space—like the archaeological layers that form both cities and identities— the artworks are interpreted as mirrors, of distant observers and embedded insiders.
The show is structured as a research update, a critical experiment: a moment to observe, assemble, and (re)consider. Bites of the complex Mediterranean imagery are then approached not solely as geographical spaces or as anthropological subjects, but as lived, emotional, and sensorial landscapes.

Often treated as separate fields of study, “Mediterranean” and “queer” are here understood as inseparable. Rather than a juxtaposition, but instead a coexistence. To be Mediterranean is, inherently, to navigate complexity, multiplicity, fluidity. And in this, it echoes queerness: not only in gender or desire, but in modes of being, resisting, and remembering. Being queer is not outside the Mediterranean—it is one of its most enduring expressions.
These perspectives are meant to form a constellation of connections—some visible, others just emerging.