French Institute in Athens

For Constantinos Pittas, a good photograph must elevate the prosaic to the preternatural, the banal to the magical.

Respected anthropologist and paleoanthropology professor at the College de France Michel Brunet will deliver a lecture titled "We Are All Africans: What We Know… What We Think We Know… and What We Don't Know," at the Athens Concert Hall on Tuesday, February 7. The scholar and researcher will base his lecture on groundbreaking work exploring the origins of man.

The French Institute in Athens will be hosting a lecture by former European Parliament president Nicole Fontaine, who held the post from 1999 to 2002, co-organized by the Constantinos Karamanlis Institute for Democracy.

Coming in the wake of his breakout show at the Benaki Museum, a spectacular collection of previously stowed-away black-and-white photographs taken in still-divided Europe in the late 1980s, Constantinos Pittas returns with a spin-off exhibition at the French Institute in Athens showcasing a selection of images captured during the same period in the Greek and French capitals.

Greek poet Kiki Dimoula will speak with Luxembourgian poet Anise Koltz at the French Institute in Athens on Monday, October 31, on the occasion of the publication of new a volume of poetry by France's Gallimard Editions, "Somnambule du Jour," which features works by Koltz. The discussion will be coordinated by translator-literary critic Cecile Inglessis-Margellos.

French philhellene Olivier Descotes, former head of the French Institute in Athens, was named on Tuesday as special adviser to Culture Minister Aristides Baltas after resigning from the helm of the Benaki Museum, a post he had assumed earlier this year.

The Athens Concert Hall is hosting a lecture by Jean Weissenbach, emeritus professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and senior member of the French Academy of Sciences, titled "40 Years of Genomics" on Tuesday, October 11.

The French Institute in Athens presents a lecture by Islam and contemporary Arab world expert Gilles Kepel on the subject of "Jihad in Europe," on Monday, May 30. Kepel is a French political scientist and professor at Sciences Po in Paris. The event is organized by the Modern Greek Culture and General Education Studies Society founded by the Moraitis School in Athens. It starts at 6.30 p.m.

The French Institute in Athens is hosting French philosopher Alain Badiou on Thursday, May 5, in a lecture titled "What Is Politics Today?" Badiou, formerly chair of Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, was also a founding member of the faculty of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. The event starts at 7 p.m.

More than 2,000 people attended a gathering to express solidarity with the people of France in Athens on Thursday evening, following the deadly attack in Paris on Wednesday against satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which left 12 people dead and 11 wounded.