Future Scenarios, The Artefact Time Machine is an art project that functions as an experimental collaborative artist platform. Maaike Stutterheim together with artist duo Van ’t Hullenaar & Vis initiated this project in 2015 with the desire to use Athens as a stage for collaborative artistic work that will function as a cultural exchange between The Netherlands and Greece. Together all the artists involved in this project will use the bridging potency of the visual language to imagine and create a new form of community between these two places.

As a portal between East and West, both now and throughout history, Greece lies at the heart of global conflict. Greece is a transit zone where ideas, philosophies & religions have always intersected, resulting in both great prosperity and great wars. It seems that due to the current crisis of humanitarian and economic politics that’s being played out, people in Greece have gotten stuck in an ongoing state of “present”, where the extreme difficulty to imagine a future is leading them towards a growing lack of hope for change. Pointing back at ancient history seems to be all that’s left for them at this moment, while Northern Europe is pointing down at Greece.

This makes you wonder what the treasured and polished revived objects of a culture so distant and disconnected from our times and contemporary Greece can possibly tell us about our current condition and how to move forward? Can artefacts somehow allow us the experience of a reversed time travel into the future? Witnessing events far beyond our personal human existence, the associative power of man made objects seems to enable us to escape the intangible constraints of linear time. Artefacts embody a dynamic relationship between past present and future. In their eternal state of here and now they mix up our sense of time, they transport us by activating personal memories and imaginary events. Surviving our limited human lifespan artefacts extend the life of its creator into immortality, securing them a place in future history.

By using, studying, linking and creating both real and fictional artefacts the artists involved in the unfolding presentations of The Artefact Time Machine will try to build a new shared future narrative with their individual works. A portal towards a joint prospect within the imaginative constructed reality of art.