Curiositas - Visitations was held in the museum’s permanent exhibition spaces on Friday, 9 December. During the workshop Giannis Chatziaslanis (photographer and visual artist), having visited more than 50 museums in Attica over a five-year period and photographing various objects, artefacts, and relics, all unrelated to each other, highlighting the element of surprise, curiosity and unexpected meeting, through a process of selection, comparison and juxtaposition, he presented a collection of images that tell stories. In this way, he helped us look more clearly at the relationship between photographers, visitors and collectors, who, by photographing museums, discover unexpected things and create different narratives.

In the first part of the workshop, Vangelis Ioakeimidis (curator of photography exhibitions and publications) introduced us to the world of the 16th century Cabinets de Curiosites. These are collections of a variety of strange objects from distant countries that collectors placed in rooms in a disorderly fashion, and shared them with those close to them, rather than the general public. Since the 17th century, the collections have been transferred from the cabinets de curiosites to Museums (the first being Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England).

In the second part of the workshop, the participants chose from 150 small prints-images of exhibits, display cases, and museum spaces from Yannis Hatziaslanis’ ‘Visitations’, thus becoming photographers themselves and creating their own sets of photos/narratives with a playful mood.

With their mobile phone, they then recorded an exhibit of their choice from the permanent exhibition of the Telecommunications Museum and captured their own story around it.

The Telecommunications Museum was one of the stops of the subsequent workshops to be held in Athens, Thessaloniki and other cities of Greece.