The ‘philosophical gesture’ constitutes an inner thread of the Biennale of Practical Philosophy as a question that wants to be radical: is a challenge  to think about a possible inner relation between the concept of gesture and the philosophical element by establishing thus a new, third, separate entity with theoretical and practical consistency. In fact, this is more about to bring to the surface the gesture as an aporia, to delve in the abundance and the complementarity of its possible meanings, to experiment senses, to create experiences-gestures of philosophical substance. As this concept opens and grows in the bosom of the Biennale and  swarms of minimal gestures emerge to weaving new discourses and practices, it meets another conceptual thread, equally significant for the project that the Laboratory of Research on Practical Philosophy is, this one of ruins and traces: gestures as traces and vice versa, ruins and remnants as traces and gestures. Islands and insular cities, archeological sites, architectural loci, pieces of buildings, uncompleted or broken structures, lands and rocks, views and dead-ends, curves and concavities, elevations and gorges, thresholds and walls, cracks and notches, silences and rustles, crests and debris, aggregations and  excavations, fissures and fossilizations, columns and buttresses, screams and murmurs, piles, earth and depth, sounds and lamenti, lights and shadows carry and hide intensively, without always visible seams, narrations, thoughts, practices, movements, itineraries, stories, memories, gestures, things, witnesses, relays, metaphors. Fragments and dusts, ruined absences and presences are not only what they appear to be, materials and natural objects, forms and disorders, in front of our gaze, but a thinking and observation experiment, a resistance, moments, passages, ends and beginnings, edges. They speak silently & not visibly otherwise, they seem to keep something for themselves, the part which is missing carrying part of an open, not immediately accessible meaning, probably the meaning being a palimpsest– they tend then to disappear, alone,  behind echoes and images, bodies crushed by historical violences, intermingled temporalities, vanishing, phantom origins and totalities, hesitating durations, lost entireties but persistent endurances, quite performances, tactful materialities, creators of their own spatiotemporal within which they sink and balance.

This conceptual grid, emerging from the viscera of the Biennale and interwoven in its unfolding over time, is finally reflected in the Biennale’s activities and places on this absconding soil of the island– traces to found, to see and hear, gestures to do and undo, ruins to perceive and loose… 

Prof. Elena Theodoropoulou (Directress of the L.R.P.Ph., Univ/ty of the Aegean)