Where the wild things grow - Public interventions - Athens - 2023
Drakopoulou Park, Patision 358 & Lamprou Porphyra, Athens 111 41
Fix Park, 10 Tsiller, Patision & Kaftantzoglou, 11144 Athens
OPENING: Friday 28 April, 19:00
Duration: 28 April- 14 May 2023
PARTICIPANTS
Rebecca Agnes, Campus Novel (Ino Varvariti, Yannis Delagrammatikas,Yannis Sinioroglou), Nikos Doulos, Juliette Brederode, Jelly Hogendorp, Eva van der Zand, Eirini Efstathiou, Matthew Gandy, Mariela Nestora, Maria Ikonomopoulou, Giorgos Papadatos , Yiannis Papadopoulos, Vangelis Savvas, Georges Salameh, Panos Sklavenitis, Fani Sofologi
A collective artistic research on the urban life on non-human organisms, a re-examination of the subversive potential of natural wilderness in the urban condition.
CONTEXT
As the urban condition expands, incorporating more and more natural habitats, wildness moves into the city. Increasing human mobility drags with it the mobility of all other organisms – causing a planetary osmosis where all species meet in new and unprecedented conditions that would not be permitted by the natural topography..This new urban nature, is developing very different ways of survival than the primeval forest landscapes.
In the complex ecosystem of the natural forest, the exchange of chemical signals through the dense and interwoven root system of plants constitutes a language, a communication code, a socialization system that contributes to their longevity and well-being. This “language”, which carries all the useful information for their survival, is lost when they are forced to adapt to the conditions of the urban environment. The architecture of the space becomes more critical than the climate in which they grow.
Programmed for the complexity of natural ecosystems, they are forced to radically change their ways of growing and reproducing. Moving from “savage”, unstructured free connections, they must survive in a human-made order. Disconnected from their vital underground root networks, deprived of rich forest soil, confined and trapped in the stranglehold of urban infrastructure, regulated by urban regulation, they depend on human care as much as their supporting ecosystems. Urban flora is trying hard to thrive in what is the planetary habitat of the future.
And if, on the one hand, there are these domesticated species, which follow the design and care of the designer or the agriculturist, vulnerable to their “urban loneliness”, on the other hand, there are those who persist in wildness, who display a wild resilience – the “plant revolutionaries” who occupy every inch of abandoned, unplanned land. They escape from the borders, from the design, break through the hard boundaries, occupy the space in unexpected ways in all directions, remaining unregistered in the urban green balance. Others escape their decorative role, bear fruit, invite their propagating allies in the face of urban fauna, find their own “urban language”, establish “communities” on roadsides, vacant lots, abandoned factories. It is where the complexity is recomposed. The measure of their resilience is the measure of their ‘aggressiveness’. The more they thrive against all odds, the more they are considered aliens, hosts – but aren’t the domesticated versions of them the truly alienated?
THE PROGRAM
The series of interventions and actions is a collective artistic research on the urban life of non-human organisms. It calls for a rethinking of the subversive potential of returning nature to the urban landscape, beyond the domesticated, designed versions of the park and garden. It examines the modes of non-human, plant and animal sociality in the urban context, their patterns of persistent resilience, their geographies, the networks they forge, their interaction with infrastructural networks, the ways in which wildness reclaims its place in the regulated urban space. Paraphrasing the title of the famous children’s book “Where the wild things are” by Maurice Sendak, about a small boy’s wandering into the world of “wildness” through the safety of the dream state, the exhibition is an invitation to explore the unknown wilderness through the familiar condition of the urban dense city center.
The program develops across 2 spaces at Patisia, Fix and Drakopoulou Park, which are both cases of spaces that have been reocuppied by nature. Ιn the place of the first, there was until 2000, the ice-brewery factory of FIX, and in the place of the second the complex of Drakopoulou textile factory. The program includes artistic interventions, a soundwalk, workshops, a projection of the film NATURA URBANA and discussions with theorists and artists.
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Opening Friday 28/ 04, 19:00
Performative acts:
20:00 Giorgos Papadatos, The other’s stage (Drakopoulou)
20:30 Panos Sklavenitis, Ad bestias (Drakopoulou)
Saturday 29/04
18:00 Juliette Brederode, Nikos Doulos, Jelly Hogendorp, Eva van der Zand,
Fluid Walkscapes – Corporeal imaginaries
Walking sticks workshop (English/ Greek)
(Drakopoulou)
Saturday 06/05
17:30 Mariela Nestora, Fieldwork
participatory workshop
19:00 Juliette Brederode, Nikos Doulos, Jelly Hogendorp, Eva van der Zand,
Fluid Walkscapes – Corporeal imaginaries
Participatory soundwalk
(For the participation is required a smarthpone with internet connection and earphones.)
Saturday 13/05
19:00 Discussion Rewilding the urban
With
Aspasia Kouzoupi (Department of Architecture University of Thessaly/
NTUA), Yorgis Noukakis (Recual), Natasa Lekkou (Zuloark Collective)
Moderation: Constantina Theodorou (Counterpublics)
21:00 Screening: NATURA URBANA | THE BRACHEN OF BERLIN, by Matthew Gandy (English)
For more information: counterpublics.info@gmail.com
// THE CIRCLE COMMUNITY // Eight notes on a collective Ritual, 2022
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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