National Garden for Subterranean Heritage: A Repository for Human/Earthly Matter

Abstract

The National Garden for Subterranean Heritage reconceptualizes the botanical National Garden of Athens, Greece, as a networked repository for human/earthly stories. Critiquing colonial practices of transplantations and classifications of imposed fragmentations embedded in the National Garden, the repository investigates situated knowledges of ground matter exposed within the subterranean metro network. National is redefined as the temporal entanglements of human inhabitations and geologic transformations, unearthed in proposed Gardens of Human/Earthly Matter within the Syntagma, Acropolis, Monastiraki, and Evangelismos stations and curated at the Repository of Subterranean Heritage within the existing botanical garden. Reacting to the absence of earthly agencies in Athens’s historical narratives, the repository restores Theophrastus’s didactic empirical gardens exhibiting conglomerated strata as coauthored systems of air, water, earth, fire, and live matter. Ancient fragments, infrastructures, and material flows are resurfaced in the decentralized gardens, exposing the agencies of power, culture, economy, and life in the formation of the city.