“I build on top of what‘s in the past,” said Aminian, who in 2013 founded Roots Revival, an organization that brings together musicians across different cultures to find commonalities between musical styles, traditions, and instruments.

“I think that‘s a healthy way of looking at traditional music,” he added.  “You should make it evolve. Traditional music is not a static thing.”

The idea of festivals as sites for unexpected synthesis and laboratories for new ideas propelled a far-reaching conversation between Daniel Popper, Marcus Fairs, the founder of the influential design and architecture magazine Dezeen, and the French architect Arthur Mamou-Mani. Festivals, said Mamou-Mani, have become “an architectural playground of experimentation. “A trailblazer  of a new breed of pop-up, digital-fabrication-led architecture, he is probably best known for creating an immense, spiraling 3D-printed wooden temple at Burning Man. “[It’s] a place where we as architects can free ourselves from  normal conditions,” added the architect and professor, who has been bringing his architecture students from the University of Westminster to Burning Man for years. In that sense, it’s not just a laboratory but a classroom, as well.

For Popper, who began his career creating large-scale immersive installations for festivals like AfrikaBurn, festivals are an ideal venue for people to experience his art. “They‘re in an environment where they‘re very open,” he said. “There‘s music. There‘s dancing, and there‘s a sense of accessibility and freedom. It’s totally different to the white walls of a gallery,” he added. “It’s a whole new way of experiencing and accessing artwork.

”In creating the installation for Further Mykonos, Popper looked to the mythological story of Leto the Titaness, the mother of Apollo and his twin sister Artemis, who according to myth, had to flee the mainland after she was impregnated by Zeus to escape his jealous wife Hera. No island would take her in until she eventually found a free-floating rock that accepted her. Once Apollo was born, he filled the sky with sunlight and anchored the rock—Delos—to the sea.

“It’s a really beautiful story,” said Stelios Brigos, the vice governor and head of culture for the South Aegean who came to attend Further Mykonos. “The name of Delos in Greek means the place that’s declared,” he added. “It‘s like a declaration of existence, the declaration of life that was born there.” In fact, the entire island chain of the Cyclades, said Brigos, was conceptualized around Delos. “Cyclades in Greek means a small circle… Delos is exactly in the center of this island complex. It’s a circle around Delos.

”Yet the great importance of Delos had largely been forgotten, said Brigos. “Mykonos is one of the most important touristic places in the world,” but many people—even locals—don’t know how it first became known. “Delos was the reason,” said Brigos, “because these people, the first tourists, came in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, just to know Delos, just to see with their eyes the beautiful monuments.”born, he filled the sky with sunlight and anchored the rock—Delos—to the sea.

But recently, a new generation is rediscovering the tiny ancient island, though projects like Further Mykonos and “Sight,” a site-specific exhibition by the British artist Antony Gormley in collaboration with Greece’s pre-eminent contemporary arts organization, Neon, and the Ephorate of Antiquities of Cyclades running until October on the archaeological site and the Museum of Delos Island. The British sculptor has created 29 iron “body forms”, several cast from his own body, that are the first artworks to be installed on Delos since it was inhabited more than 5,000 years ago.

When you walk through the ruins of Delos today, you see not only classical ancient Greek architecture but depictions of Syrian deities, a temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis, the ruins of a synagogue, Phoenician, Italian, and Palestinian artifacts—indicative of Delos’ time as a cultural melting pot. So it was important that The Eternal Festival bring together artists from across the world—like the celebrated Turkish DJ, musician, and composer, Mercan Dede, whose music blends elements of Sufi music and dance with electronic music to create an utterly contemporary, unique musical style that has been embraced across the global festival circuit. He closed The Eternal Festival with a stunning sunset performance accompanied by a whirling dervish dancer.

“We have so many people on this island, and we have to provoke them to go to Delos,” said Brigos. With Further Mykonos, he continued, “people will come. They will hear this story. We will have artists from around the world. This is magnificent. Because one beautiful festival gives us the opportunity to think about where everything started.” He added: “Without our past, we cannot construct our future.”
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The preceding article is excerpted from Further, an initiative by Design Hotels™





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