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Soft protocols
August-November 2021.
Series of interventions at the border of the city, Athens,
organized by COUNTERPUBLICS
Soft spaces, spaces in the interstices of “hardly” defined territorial entities, emerging in the gaps of legal jurisdictions, are always “in between”, trapped in a legal limbo, spaces of a-legality by default, deviant territories of action.
They are rather socially constructed than materially defined, being both arenas of negotiation and under negotiation themselves; their borders being fuzzy and porous. In their indecisive and incomplete form, they are exposed to appropriation, susceptible to the exercise of the soft power of diplomacy and governance. Yet, in the same ambivalence they can be spaces of experimentation, they can be offered as alternatives to current rigid spatial patterns of social and political action. Their manifold potential exceeds that of strictly regulated space.
In the urban context they can be spaces of unregulated wilderness, there where the law gives place to unwritten protocols, where non-institutionalized forms of coexistence have to be constantly re-invented. In the municipality of Athens one such area is the zone from Tris Gefyres (Three Bridges), where the Kifissos River is revealed under the National Road, till the Philadelfia junction, an area of multiple, overlying and fuzzy borders. It is both the boundary of the city to the river and the autoroute, the meeting point of the dense urban fabric with a mutated nature, a jurisdictional border between three municipalities, the boundary of industrial uses with the residential zone; there where different phases of urbanization overlap leaving patches of the past untouched; it is a field of multiple negotiations. Its urban landscape constitutes an indecisive urban reality.
The project is an invitation to artists, architects, performers, and theorists to explore the possibilities of these open spaces, to appropriate them defining an open syntax of use, inventing soft protocols for an expanded public space.
With a series of interventions, ephemeral installations, urban drifts, performances and discussions, taking place in the wider area we aim to negotiate the balance between this insubordinate urban condition and the decisiveness of action- between the openness of possibility and enclosure of form.
The project will be documented in a collective edition, together with theoretical contributions at the end of the process.
Participants
Rebecca Agnes, akoo-o collective (Nikos Bubaris, Sofia Grigoriadou, Dana Papachristou, Giorgos Samantas), Ludovic Bernhardt, Lucia Bricco, Campus Novel (Giannis Delagrammatikas, Ino Varvariti, Yiannis Sinioroglou), Eirene Efstathiou, Stefania Migliorati, Kostas Bassanos, Giorgos Papadatos, Nina Papaconstantinou, Artemis Potamianou, VASCOS ( Kostas Tzimoulis – Vassilis Noulas ), Dimitris Halatsis
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Artistic Practices: Housing as
social agreement
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Sam Durant's installation, We Are the People,on view at
Project Row Houses in 2003 Photo by Rick
Lowe, courtesy Project Row Houses
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http://sofiadona.com/
http://errands.gr/
Public Domain
The project consists in 50 interventions in the public space of 25 different cities, and has been presented in 2 phases: first in Stockholm Supermarket Independent Art-Fair in 2012 and successively in Geneva Milkshake-agency project space in 2014.
After the Rage
8 - 14.12.2011
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| Kader Attia, Couscous Aftermaths, 3000 year old movement, 2009, Video, Courtesy Kader Attia and Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin |
After the rage is a video screening project taking place over 7 days which will feature the work of artists from Arab countries and the Arab diaspora.
In selecting these artists, the project seeks to draw attention to the geo-cultural conditions that have emerged in the past year, what the media termed the “Arab Spring”, thereby predetermining its eventual course. The end purpose here is not to come up with regional clusterings or to look for national and religious stereotypes, nor is it to locate geo-strategic blueprints and power relations.
It is, rather, to reveal the symbolic dimension of this reordering of societies, which is taking place through the mobilization of a massive part of their nexus, despite the heterogeneous, contradictory and, often, violent means involved.
The search for these experiences, directly or otherwise, in the work of Arab artists, not as a mere chronicle in a linear relationship to events or future possibilities, but as a framework, whose common thread is the “adversity condition”, is especially relevant for contemporary visual art production in Greece, a society dealing with equally peculiar conditions, albeit of different origin.
Participating artists: Ahmed AlSaer, Basma AlSharif, Kader Attia, Ismail Bahri, Taysir Batniji, Mounir Fatmi, Khaled Hafez, Lamia Joreige, Maha Maamoun, Walid Raad, Larissa Sansour.
Curating: Giorgos Papadatos
Organization: Lo and Behold
Texts: Charlotte Bank, Ilias Marmaras
Opening: Thurday 8.12.2011, 20.30pm
Duration: 8-14 December 2011
Venue: Beton7, Pydnas 7, 11855 Votanikos, tel. 0030 2107512625, www.beton7.com