The project's title carries an intended ambiguity:
While ideas, the illustration of temporality and of the temporal imagination are usually seen as the main concerns of historical research, the imagination of history itself always invokes illusion and fraud. Our main concern was an examination of terms like re-construction, dis-illusion, authenticity, history, vision and
the search for traces.
The search for traces synonymous with the active reconstruction of the past as well as a projection of present states into the future. Scientists try to find out about the future by analyzing traces of the past; the gypsy draws destiny from the palm of the hand; the shaman derives visions from the intestines of an animal. The future is always told from the past and the past describes the things that have remained visible and real in the present.
The imagination unites the past with the future. Beside this topic we have the phenomenon of tourism. It is quite natural that contemporary artists will be dealing with this on a place like Ephesus with approximately 10.000 visitors a day.
The artists' work was spread all over the site. For this project Ephesus became an open space for contemporary artistic manifestations.
