In 2009 emerging artist Haim Sokol received the “New Generation” special prize sponsored by Stella Art Foundation at the Annual Russian National Award for Contemporary Visual Arts “Innovation”. The essential part of the reward was Foundation’s support in creation of the monument To All Who Ever Lived Here, which is included in the Foundation’s Thessaloniki Biennale program. The monument will be installed in front of the Thessaloniki port main entrance and will be donated to the city on behalf of the Foundation.
The artist comments the project as follows: “There are several cities on earth in which the fourth dimension, that of time, is felt particularly strongly. Thessaloniki, is undoubtedly, one of such cities. That is why one involuntarily feels an incredible desire to create here something in time rather than in space. Somebody once described a work of art as ’a SOS signal sent to future centuries’. We live in the future, an incredible, distant future, one which we couldn’t dream of even fifty or one hundred years ago. Therefore, we are a destination point and addressees for all the people who, at some point in time before us, dreamt of something, created something and were striving to achieve something. All those who once lived here.”
The sculpture comprises a monumental concrete stela, five meters high, with a mail box fastened to its very top, thus, one will try in vain to through a letter into the slot. For the opening the city government will send “invitations” to the Thessaloniki addresses of people forced by different circumstances to leave the city. Thessaloniki was founded in the Alexander the Great’s native land soon after his death of in IV century BC and since that the city has known the rises, being Constantinople’s rival, and falls, being conquered in many wars. During the ages it belonged to Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, the Second Bulgarian Empire, Venetian Republic, Ottoman Empire and now is a part of modern Greece. The city attracted people of Thrace, Arabia, the crusaders, the Slavs, the Goths, who flocked to the city and in many cases attacked it. The miscellanies of nations inhabiting Thessaloniki were widened in XV century by 20.000 of Sephardic Jews who were invited to the city after having been expelled from Spain; the city is often called “Mother of Israel”. Haim Sokol made the monument not to majestic historical events that took place here, but to all people’s destinies without exception, to all “grains of history sand” who were participants and moving forces of this history.
