ΜΟΡΙΑΙΕΛΑΙΑΙ /

Sacred Olives 

A Cities of Glass project by Anna Pangalou



ΜΟΡΙΑΙΕΛΑΙΑΙ / Sacred Olives emerged from a yearlong creative engagement between Athens-based sound artist Anna Pangalou and Cities of Glass curator Meg Shiffler. 

Through research and dialogue, the two shaped a project that unfolds in the liminal spaces between myth, history, and contemporary urban life. The work is grounded in Anna’s relationship to her city: a place where she was born and has left and returned to many times, always encountering it with the double perspective of insider and stranger.

Renowned throughout Greece as a classical vocalist turned experimental sound artist, Pangalou approached this project by centering her ongoing inquiry into the symbiotic relationship between breath and organic life in all its forms. For Cities of Glass, Anna chose to focus her project on olive trees lining the exterior of Plato’s Academy Park, located in a vibrant semi-industrial neighborhood outside the flow of Athens’ central tourist sites. Existing in a kind of geographic limbo between the park and the surrounding streets, Anna’s olive trees are descendants of the most sacred and ancient grove in Athens. They are witnesses to millennia of history, persisting at the edges of ongoing urban transformation.

The olive trees, rooted in nine distinct locations, are both Anna’s subjects and collaborators. She focuses conceptually on the quiet mirroring between the human tracheobronchial tree and the branching structure of the olive tree: one’s exhalation becomes the other’s vital inhalation. To draw attention to these often-overlooked trees, sections of bark are adorned with delicate copper leaf using a technique associated with Byzantine icon-making, transforming the trees into subtle icons that catch light and the gaze of passersby. Copper—a material long associated with craft, exchange, and transformation across the Mediterranean—will slowly oxidize and be absorbed into the bark over time.

This graceful intervention is accompanied by an audio composition for each site, weaving together field recordings of the surrounding soundscape—the rustle of olive branches, ambient urban rhythms—and the sound of Anna’s breath. ΜΟΡΙΑΙΕΛΑΙΑΙ / Sacred Olives’ sculptural and sonic elements invite audiences to listen, explore, and linger on-site or online—to encounter Athens as a city of fragments, whispers, and small sacred sites hiding in plain view.

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Click here for information about the Cities of Glass initiative and process.