Hic Sunt Dracones (Here Lay Dragons): Mapping the Unknown: A Project by Rick Lowe

This book was published on the occasion of Hic Sunt Dracones (Here Lay Dragons): Mapping the Unknown: A Project by Rick Lowe at Benaki Museum / Pireos 138, Athens. The 2023 exhibition featured works by Lowe related to two public community initiatives: Victoria Square Project (2016–23) in Athens and Project Row Houses (1993–2018) in Houston. These collaborative, socially engaged projects are complemented by Lowe’s collaged paintings and works on paper, which draw from the visual language of maps to explore cartographic, social, and allegorical themes. Lowe—with curators Yorgos Tzirtzilakis and Polina Kosmadaki—juxtaposed these works with historical materials from the Benaki Museum’s collections, creating unexpected connections between past and present, known and unknown.

Fully illustrated with color reproductions of the works in the exhibition, including the historic artifacts, the bilingual (English/Greek) catalogue includes a foreword by Benaki Museum academic director George Manginis, an introduction by Kosmadaki and Tzirtzilakis, and several essays. In these, Kosmadaki and Tzirtzilakis each explore themes of mapping and cosmology in relation to Lowe’s work, Dieter Roelstraete offers a “road map” of Lowe’s practice, Micheljohn Raftopoulos discusses the exhibition’s architectural design, Fani Paraforou analyzes the Victoria Square Project, and Thomas Maloutas and Stavros Spyrellis introduce the Athens Social Atlas, a digital compendium of texts and visual material on the social structures and processes that shape Greece.