so the story goes...

in 1950 the greek archaeologist phaedra galanakis was walking in the hills of south-western crete, in the shadow of the levka ori mountains and near the village of paleochora. on a dry rocky hillside she discovered some ceramic shards that had obviously belonged to very large vessels, the sort that ancient greeks used for storing food items in sedentary city life. yet nobody knew of a major greek or minoan settlement in this area of crete. in spite of this, galanakis assumed that the shards were minoan in origin, although she noted some design inconsistencies that made her not altogether sure of this assumption.

despite many unanswered questions about these ceramic shards, they sat in the archives of the archeological museum in heraklion, arousing no interest or attention for more than half a century.

in the scorching southern mediterranean summer the goats on crete dig out burrows in the rocky ground, seeking out the moist cool soil underneath. last year a goat herder began noticing more ancient pottery shards surfacing on the hillsides. then, a momentous discovery: a piece of a modified doric column. the goats had discovered what appeared to be signs of an ancient city, in a region of crete where nobody knew one existed.

the, gianacarlo rossini, an archaeologist from the university of bologna in italy who was vacationing on crete, heard about the discovery and decided to come and investigate. he noticed some peculiar things about both the ceramic shards and the column fragment. first of all, the motifs on the pottery, while similar in some ways to minoan art, were definitely not classical minoan. and secondly, the column exhibited some characteristics of bronze-age doric greek designs, but with some minoan qualities, a sort of hybrid design.

rossini spent the next few weeks excavating the site with the goats, uncovering more pottery, bits of columns and other telltale signs of civilization. then a female goat named molina made a breakthrough discovery: a fragment of a wall with an inscription, a fragment from plato's book "the laws." this led rossini to formulate a radical yet inescapable theory, that this was an attempt to actually build plato's utopian city of "magnesia."

for various reasons rossini suspects that the city was never completed. he points to evidence of roads that were started but don't lead anywhere, a temple floor laid out but the walls apparently never constructed. thermoluminescence dating (a very accurate dating method for ceramics) of the pottery shards indicates their age to be between 350 to 360 b.c., around the time of plato's death. archaeological and historical evidence suggests that around the same time, crete endured a series of droughts, and the wooded western part of the island suffered from deforestation fueled by greek ship-building, as well as denuding of the hillsides from overgrazing. it's possible that the city suffered an environmental collapse just as it was being built, driving it's builders to abandon the project.

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now we, as land artists, environmental artists, photographers, filmmakers, digital artists, architects, painters, writers, poets, or whatever discipline we're from, endeavour to recreate not Plato's fabled city of magnesia, but rather it's traces, either physical or virtual. what would pottery shards from magnesia look like? magnesian-doric columns? maps of the site? we will create artifacts and a site of the imagination, a framework that blends art with archaeology, fiction with history, and the physical landscape of crete with philosophical consciousness.