Curatorial Projects




 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


  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

Artistic Practices: Housing as social agreement




                                        


Οngoing archive
26 October – 27 November  2016


Curated by Giorgos Papadatos & Sofia Dona

Parallel to the workshop Co-housing practices/ Ιnventing Prototypes for Athens
organized by Co-Hab Athens & NetHood (Zurich) & INURA Zurich & Athens

Hosted by #ThisIsACo-op Greek Pavilion, Giardini,
15th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia


Sam Durant's installation, We Are the People,on view at Project Row Houses in 2003  Photo by Rick Lowe, courtesy Project Row Houses



 Description/Concept

Postwar capitalism in the West has promoted its growth on the ideal of house ownership (with recent catastrophic financial effects) in a process of commodification of necessities of life. Commodification of housing though, more than being just a method of capital accumulation, resulted in the reconceptualisation of public and private space. Pierre Bourdieu describes a person’s existential relation to their position in terms of the social status conferred by the appropriation/possession of a particular extent of physical space: “Each agent may be characterized by the place where he or she is situated more or less permanently, that is, by her place of residence (those who are “without hearth or home,” without “permanent residence” … have almost no social existence—see the political status of the homeless) … It is also characterized by the place it legally occupies in space through properties (houses and apartments or offices, land for cultivation or residential development, etc.) which are more or less congesting … . It follows that the locus and the place occupied by an agent in appropriated social space are excellent indicators of his or her position in social space
Nowadays, in the wake of the recent housing crises which have subverted the notion of housing as a consumer commodity, co-housing and community projects emerge as answers to the “Housing Question”. This shift towards collective solutions has been addressed by artistic, architectural and curatorial initiatives that over the past five decade have variously depicted and intervened into this unevenly developing urban condition.
“Artistic Practices: Housing as social agreement” is an ongoing archive aiming to unfold a cartography of approaches by artists to the notion of the house, investigate and challenge the ways in which housing is not only imagined, but also effectuated by artists. Furthermore intends to point out the ways in which forms of cultural production can be reclaimed as tools with which to design, defend and reinvent social space.
The works featured in the archive are organized around four leitmotifs :Housing as utopia”, highlights the trasnsformative, disruptive potential of housing in the social imagination, as the first step to a radical autonomy.“Housing as uneven development “raises the issues of inequalities in the distribution of the right to housing. Housing as dystopic construction” illustrated by a series of projects that explore the conflicts and correlations between the represented space of and the social and political action. Housing as community building” explores the role of artist as social designer, the statial practices of commons, and arts based revitalization of under-resourced urban areas.


Featured works by

Rebecca Agnes / Jonas Dahlberg / Giorgos Gyparakis / Tea Mäkipää / Artemis Potamianou / Kostis Velonis / Erwin Wurm
Angela Ferreira / Eugenio Tibaldi / Yiannis Theodoropoulos / Mona Vatamanu Florin Tudor / Giorgos Papadatos / Dorit Margreiter / Errands / Taysir Batniji
Kimsooja /  Michael Rakowitz / Nicos Charalambidis /  Róza El-Hassan / Tudor Bratu / Teddy Cruz / Raumlabor
Ahmet Öğüt / Sofia Dona / Marjetica Potrč  / Zafos Xagoraris / Rick Lowe Project Row Houses /


INFO

Giorgos Papadatos
  
Sofia Dona 
NTUA / MFA Bauhaus Uni Weimar
http://sofiadona.com/
http://errands.gr/
 

Link  http://thisisaco-op.gr/en/co-housing-practices-workshop/   























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.

Curated by: Artemis Potamianou and Giorgos Papadatos

Essays by: Elpida Karaba, Costantina Theodorou, Eva Fotiadi and Kostis Stafylakis

Graphic Design: Delia Potamianou

Participating artists:

Lanfranco Aceti - Elena Bajo - Ludovic Bernhardt - Bianco-Valente -

Marc Bijl & Alejandro Vidal - Erik Binder - Campus Novel - Δημήτρης Χρηστίδης/ Dimitris Christidis  - Common Culture -  Julie René de Cotret  - Benoît Delaunay  - Alix Delmas  -Guillaume Durand - Γιάννης Γρηγοριάδης/ Yiannis Grigoriadis - Gaël Grivet - Guerrilla Girls -  Γιώργος Γυπαράκης/ Giorgos Gyparakis - Emma Hammarén - Internationale Surplace - Γιάννης Ισιδώρου/ Yiannis Isidorou - Lilli Kinnunen - Θάνος Κλωνάρης/ Thanos Klonaris - Stephen Lee - Μαρία Λιανού/ Maria Lianou -  Tea Mäkipää - Sanna Marander - Εύα Μαραθάκη/ Eva Marathaki - Jenny Marketou - Δήμητρα Μαρούδα/ Dimitra Marouda -Μάρω Μιχαλακάκου/ Maro Michalakakos - Tanja Ostojic - Ευτύχης Πατσουράκης/ Eftihis Patsourakis /

Celine Peruzzo - Derrick Piens - Ίρις Πλαϊτάκη/ Iris Plaitakis -Θοδωρής Προδρομίδης/ Theo Prodromidis - Luke Ralphs - Erika Rothenberg –

Société Réaliste - Βασιλεία Στυλιανίδου/ Vassiliea Stylianidou - Γιώργος Ταξιαρχόπουλος/ Yorgos Taxiarchopoulos - Λίνα Θεοδώρου/ Lina Theodorou - Magnus Thierfelder - Eugenio Tibaldi - Σοφία Τούμπουρα/ Sofia Touboura  - Νίκος Τρανός/ Nikos Tranos - Alexia Turlin - Ανδρέας Βούσουρας/ Andreas Voussouras -

Θεόδωρος Ζαφειρόπουλος/ Theodoros Zafeiropoulos - Italo Zuffi .

Publication realized with the support of NEON







After the Rage

8 - 14.12.2011


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