Agathe Kalfas & Mathias Benguigui
Asphodel Songs

Exhibition Details

In 2015, Lesbos became the centre of Europe’s largest population movement since World War II. Situated only 12 kilometres from the Turkish coast, the Greek island still bears the traces of the Great Catastrophe of 1922 when a million Orthodox Greeks from Asia Minor were deported to the other shore, 45,000 of whom landed in Lesbos in the greatest deprivation. A century later, their descendants provide assistance to modern-day refugees, to the extent that the island’s inhabitants were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. From this starting point, Kalfas and Benguigui developed a work that seeks to bring a new perspective to this highly mediatised territory. The duo examine the traces left in the landscape, meet its populations, and collect stories in order to have a more profound understanding of a phenomenon that characterises the history of the human being.