Theme of the Convention: Culture, Cultivation and Civilisation
Chairs: Profs. Eero Tarasti, Altti Kuusamo (Helsinki)
Assistants: Paul Forsell, Mikko Metsälampi, Aleksi Haukka
Venues: Finnish and Danish Institutes at Athens, October 1–5, 2025
Location & admission information
• Finnish Institute at Athens: Zitrou 16, Athens, office@finninstitute.gr
• Danish Institute at Athens: Herefondos 14, Athens, info@diathens.gr
• Both Institutes are close to the Acropolis.
• Visitors’ fee: whole event 100€; one day 25€.
• Participants’ fee: 200 €.
Inquiries: paul.forsell@gmail.com; mikko.metsaelampi@outlook.com
PROGRAMME
Wednesday Oct. 1
2 p.m.
Opening
3–5 p.m.
Alexandros Lagopoulos (Athens): The Missing Link in the Semiotic Theory of Culture
Mattia Thibault (Tampere): Semiospheric projections: the city and the museum as spaces of cultivation.
Athanasios Votsis (Twente, Netherlands): Foundations for the study of civilisations, the theory of semiotopes
Altti Kuusamo (Helsinki): Veritas filia temporis. From Iconography to Aesthetic Views.
6–8 p.m.
Lecture concert at the Danish Institute. How Sibelius Became Sibelius. (Eila Tarasti, piano, Athens Quartet, from Helsinki: Elias Nyman, Sebastian Silén, violin, Petrus Laitinmäki, alto, Lauri Rantamoijanen, cello, and Eero Tarasti, piano and lecture)
Thursday Oct. 2
10–12 a.m.
Mathieu Schneider (Strasbourg): Who is Lili Marleen? An essay on intertextual semiotics in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen (1980)
Roberto Mastroianni (Torino): The anthropologist as curator and the curator as anthropologist. Cultural heritage, contemporaneity, and relational art
Elzbieta Blotnicka-Masur (Lublin): University Museum as a Guardian of Cultural Heritage – Between Academic World and Society
Sebastian Silén (Helsinki): From Signs to Sound: Realizing Nordic Musical Elements in Sibelius’s Violin and Piano
12 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Lunch
2–5 p.m.
Hannu Riikonen (Helsinki): Culture and Civilisation in James Joyce’s Ulysses
Karin Boklund-Lagopoulos (Athens): What Is Our Culture?
Despina Gialatzi (Thessaloniki): Metamorphoses of the Mythical Tale of the Psyche
Mikko Metsälampi (Turku): Can We Step Outside Our Own Consciousness – a Philosophical Inquiry
Dina Babushkina (Twente, Netherlands): Semiotics of the Absurd
6–8 p.m.
Concert at the Residence of the Ambassador of Finland, (Athene Quartet, Eila Tarasti ja Julian Hellaby, piano). Transportation from the Finnish Institute.
Friday Oct. 3
10–12 a.m.
Julian Hellaby (London): The Rivalry Between Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi – an Existential Semiotic Approach
Silvia Barbotto (Torino): Art, Sound and Embodied Enunciation. [Improvisation as Counter-Current Process of Signification?]
Lorenzo L.D. Incardona & Giuseppe Laricchia (Bologna): Cultural Stereotypes in Artificially Generated Music. Experiments on Italian Pop
12 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Lunch
2–7 p.m.
Kristian Bankov (Sofia): B(ai)ldung – how Artificial Intelligence and Social Media Change the Structure of Education
Daniel Röhe (Brasilia): Modal Verbs. An Intellectual History (1524-2025)
Peter Salvucci (Istanbul): The Significance of Cultural Epistemes in the Semiosis of Turkish Makam Music
Panu Heimonen (Helsinki): Moral Philosophy in the 18th Century and its Impact on Music, Special Case of Mozart Concertos
Malwina Marciniak (Krakow): Concerto Genre and its Meanings in the Light of Existential Semiotics
Saturday Oct. 4
10–12 a.m.
Aleksi Haukka (Helsinki): Transductions as Foundation of Cultural Communication: Examples from Finland of the 1800s
Santeri Skofelt (Turku): Interpreting Useless Suffering Through Levinas and Meister Eckhart
Tom Pankhurst (Bristol): The relevance of Schenker analysis in music culture. Its Interpetation by Existential Semiotics
12 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Lunch
2–5 p.m.
Jean-Marie Jacono (Aix-Marseille) Analyse sémiotique & les contextes sociologique et politique d’une chanson entre la France (et l’Europe) et la Russie de Gilbert Bécaud (reprise en espagnol et en finnois par Tapani Perttu en 1969.
Kalliope Stiga (Athens): Mikis Theodorakis dans son contexte culturel.
Sunday Oct. 5.
10–12 a.m.
Future of the Academy of Cultural Heritages. Closure of the Symposium