We have been living under lockdown circumstances that took us by surprise, since 2020. Unprecedented conditions undoubtedly attract artistic action and bring the collective unconscious to the surface. What does solitary confinement mean today? What does purification mean and what are its rituals, what is goodbye? How is life for the community and what does the community “kill” in order to live? Whom does vulnerable represent? These are some of the big questions that the cultural and creative community will be dealing with in the years to come.

"Project Lazaretta" is a multi-level project that is producing and presenting Greek and international digital culture with reference to the two Lazarets of Syros and Corfu. The project is inspired by the modern historical moment of the pandemic. The goal is to raise awareness of our cultural heritage and to transform the past into a meaningful present.

Lazaret of Syros and Lazaret of Corfu as all Lazarets of the Mediterranean basin were points of purification for the moving inhabitants and visitors already from the 16th until the 19th century. Contagious diseases of the time easily turned into pandemics so isolation on a Lazaret island, which was usually located outside the major port, was necessary. Isolation before entering the community lasted for forty [40] quarantine days.

These buildings are nowadays often neglected, ruined monuments of cultural and architectural heritage that have not been properly highlighted nor substantially connected with the cities of tourist interest to which they border.

Project Lazaretta intends to highlight the cultural heritage as well as the role and significance of digital culture. Moreover, the project aims to give artists the opportunity to create in times of confinement, to activate local communities by giving them an active role and to design new cultural paths by use of new technologies. Project Lazareta is also laying foundations for upcoming international synergies.

Project Lazaretta is supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports and is developed in two parts:

Digital Culture Platform

Creation of a new platform of digital culture with Digital & Video Art, Screen Dance, Video Performances, Sound Art. Work is inspired by the two Lazarets of Syros and Corfu while focusing on the modern historical moment of the Pandemic.

Audio testimonials from artists and citizens around the world

Audio documents of thoughts, words, sentences, sounds of people [adults, young people, and children] living in today's Pandemic and in confinement.

Participants sent an audio in mp3 format with their voice answering the following questions:

• What are you seeing?
• What are you hearing?
• What are you feeling?

A Soundscape-Storytelling has been created by these audio documents, the voices of the pandemic. It is an original audio collage, reflecting mental and emotional traces by people in times of Pandemic.

• Digital projects constitute a permanent collection of the digital platform "Project Lazaretta".
• Project Lazaretta remains open for submission of art work entries as well as for audio testimonies.

A piece of our soul is always in the space of our confinement because we explore the person with all his psychological, physical, social and emotional characteristics, who experiences it.

We realize  this Project in order to keep our traces alive.

These traces that make the experience of each of us unique, that come from the centuries of our existence but also that lead to the hope of the of the good life we desire for ourselves and for humanity.

And Cicero says:

"Nothing is so royal, so high, so generous from offering help to beggars, to lifting those who have fell on the ground, to offering salvation and freeing people from danger"

«Nihil est tam regium, tam liberale, tamque munificum
Quam opem ferre supplicibus,
Excitare afflictos, dare salutem,
Liberare periculis homines»
Cicero

Our current experience of the Pandemic is not something new.

It unites us with thousands of people who passed through the Lazaretta of the world and more specifically through the Lazaretta of Syros and Corfu, two of the most significant in Greece, that have worked as pesthouses, prisons, as places of execution, as asylum , as leprosy.

What are your spiritual traces, your DNA that you bequeath to our world's struggle against pain, fear and death, and that future historians will recognize and describe, speaking of today 's World Pandemic?

Companion to us:

Those who passed, stayed, survived, imprisoned, died in Lazaretta of the world and mainly to those in Syros and Corfu.

Karl –Bernhard Stark, archaeologist, 1824- 1879

Lazaretto of Syros 1871 "Every look from the narrow veranda… made all this grief temporarily forgotten: the sea, the city, the mountain peaks beautifully colored morning and night, one island next to the other..."

Lazaretto of Syros 1871 "… instead of money little by little, there was a table, a chair and a bed."

Hermoupolis newspaper, 1871

"We hope that cholera will disappear and that free transportation abroad will happen again quickly. If it continues for a long time, the working class and commercial interests will suffer greatly."

Σωματείο Λαζαρέτο Κέρκυρας, somatio-lazareto.gr 

Fighters of the Greek  Resistance and the Democratic Army were executed in Lazaretto during the Civil War.

Your companion is also every modern man in this world, where as Albert Camus says:

"[He] knew that the plague bacillus does not die and will return after many years through the sheets, the papers, … to torture or even to teach people…"