The Project: Moriai Elaiai / Sacred Olives

Moriai Elaiai / Sacred Olives emerges from a yearlong dialogue between curator Meg Shiffler and Athens-born sound artist Anna Pangalou. Meeting weekly across distances, the two shaped a project that looks both to Athens’ deep past and to its overlooked present, unfolding in the liminal spaces between myth, history and contemporary urban life. The work is grounded in Pangalou’s relationship to her city: a place she has left and returned to many times, always encountering it with the double perspective of insider and stranger.

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The project takes root near Plato’s Academy Park, a site where ancient knowledge, sacred olive groves, and the social fabric of Athens once converged. Today, the park lies at the edge of a lively neighborhood of working-class families, immigrants, and students, drawing visitors but never at the overwhelming scale of the city’s major tourist sites. Lining the park’s perimeter stand ancient olive trees, descendants of the sacred moriai once dedicated to Athena. Positioned just outside the park, and not fully absorbed into the surrounding streets, these trees exist in a kind of geographic limbo — witnesses to millennia of history, surviving despite the city’s relentless urbanization.

 

For Pangalou, these olive trees are both subjects and collaborators. She has adorned sections of the bark of nine trees with delicate copper leaf — a material that will slowly oxidize, fade, and eventually disappear. This gesture mirrors her parallel creation of breath-based audio compositions, in which the human body becomes another kind of living tree: the bronchial branches of the lungs echoing the root systems underground, the rush of air through branches recalling the sound of breath itself. Together, these sculptural and sonic elements invite audiences to listen, walk, and linger — to reencounter Athens as a city of fragments, whispers, and small sacred sites hiding in plain view.

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What makes Moriai Elaiai / Sacred Olives distinct is its process. Created entirely outside institutional or commercial frameworks, it was shaped only through the accountability of artist and curator to one another. This framework allowed for freedom, risk, and generosity — qualities that run counter to the increasing pressures of state and market control on artistic practice and institutions worldwide. In this way, the project is not only about what is seen or heard, but also about how it was made: as an act of trust, dialogue, and gift-giving.​