Location: Koumoundourou Square.
The issues that interested us during the workshop that preceded the action concerned the public sphere with emphasis on immigration, borders, displacement, common resources, and social ecology. The workshop focused on human condition. The ways of interaction, and the exchange of cultures and ideas, are the ones that need to be studied on the opposite side of spatial segregation and xenophobia.
Location: Ark in the patio at Benaki Museum.
A gesture against the climate of violence and the sweep operations in the center of Athens. The action is about the displaced urban nomads who live in the inhospitable city center. As a crowd which consists of subjectivities, entering the ark with their habits and their foods. They show us their faces, they tell their story, they talk about the primary foods they love and save inside the ark, which becomes a place of hospitality. The ark becomes their shelter.
We participated in the Love Difference Pastries with the project «Pie, transformed pastries” which was the beginning of a dialogue on the occasion of the pastries in the wider Mediterranean region. Hospitality and sharing are two concepts that emerge through this project and, at the same time, define it. Especially the pastries, that is something more than the actual nutritional need, being this ‘something more’, shapes cultural relations either as dessert or as a treat or as an exchange. Continue reading
Location: Monastiraki Square
The action was a comment on immigration, providing the colorful paved ground of the square, so as to welcome hospitality and cohabitation within the city.
At the colorful cobbled square which symbolizes the multiculturalism of Athens, words were spread like borders, love, hospitality etc, in different languages of different nationalities to remind the need for communication and social gathering of the city’s nomads in this square which becomes a crossroad. The need to overcome fear regarding the foreign and the different… The words we wrote symbolize specific meanings that are essential for the city center. The rope wrapped around us symbolizes the borders we constantly meet and the desire to cross them.
Route: Walking along Kifissos river. Sailing. Travelling along Faliron coast and Psyttalia Island.
In this action the teams Urban Void, Nomadic Architecture Network, Flux factory and CUP walked with the participants along Kifissos river, in Faliro Bay, and at the mouth of Kifissos river and sailed through Faliro Bay towards the island of Psyttalia.
The area of Faliro Bay remains inaccessible from the city, starting from the Peace and Friendship Stadium (S.E.F) up to the Olympic facilities. An entire part of the coast, the Faliro Delta, remains a kind of a non-place, a cut-off piece, because the sports facilities are abandoned and the beach is a desertland. The mouths of Kifissos and Ilissos rivers are located there.
Location: Byzantine Museum
The “unbuilt” may be understood as something akin to Arjun Appadurai’s “imaginary” that harbors the potential to form new social realities that are envisioned by individuals or groups. A workshop stationed at the Byzantine Museum will aim to explore the” imaginary” dimension of inhabitation in the case of diasporic communities constituted across national borders, focusing on the agency of women. Populations today link themselves to wider constituencies of religious, ethnic or gender affiliation beyond national borders, and various diasporic public spheres become the crucibles of a postnational order. In fact, Saskia Sassen claims that it is precisely within the condition of globalization that disparate experiences of immigrant women acquire a “presence,” obtaining the potential for new cross-bordered collectivities to emerge. If homes, neighborhoods, cities, and nations have conventionally been spatial realms of identification and belonging, such relations are now becoming unstable, and new types of consciousness, realms of operation and allegiance are being sought.
Route: Koulouri square in Gkazochori- Polycarpou Street in Elaionas – Markoni. Suggestive actions at stop points.
The area of Elaionas, known from ancient times with the same place-name, that took it from the ancient olive grove of Athens, occupies the central part of the residential area of the capital (3 km from Omonia square). It connects the eastern with the western districts of Athens and this is the region with the longest industrial history. The area consists of Byzantine churches, factories, houses, olive trees and vineyards, archaeological findings and vacant spaces with no use. All these make up an un-built area, and can be characterized as the un-built zone of Athens. Because of its industrial characteristics (pollution, noise, etc.) it was not considered until now an area worthy of exploitation and as a result large parts of the area have been left un-built. This was soon reversed, because large parts of land at very low prices were attractive to the real estate industry, which will leave nothing un-built. Many Roma families were already kicked out of the area where the action took place. At that time it was announced that the new stadium of Panathinaikos as well as shopping malls etc. would be built in the area.
Wandering through spatial situations -actions in the area of Gazohori.
The project is based on the involvement of people that come together, and then to their involvement regarding the place and the metropolitan conditions, as well as their penetration in them.
Location: Koulouri Square, Gazohori
Along with the children of 87th intercultural primary school, a playground was designed in an empty plot across the main square which belongs to the municipality. Construction –action was implemented with soil, ropes, nets etc. Before the action we made collage designs and maquettes inside the school along with the children during the entire school year.
Location: reception Centre of asylum seekers in Lavrio
The apolis (citiless) keep increasing in the modern metropolis as more and more people leaving their place of origin. Without papers, refugees, immigrants, unemployed, homeless, marginalized groups, live as exiles in the postmodern metropolis, in its gaps. These cut-out environments are scattered, changing and fluid, as they are produced by the city itself and its transformations. Vacant spaces in the state of the right and generally in the idea of belonging. In such spaces that function as shelters within the city, the architect’s opinion is canceled and another opinion is formed, that of the fleeting, fluid, physical habitation. During this habitation features of community life are created- and these sites create another network that extends from the heart of the city up to the distant periphery.
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Location: Koulouri Square, Gazohori
It began from an anthropological and experiential research-study of the Gazohori area. The title “I beg you not to tear down my world,” came from the graffiti of a child written in the local Turkish dialect. Our goal was the involvement in community life, the understanding of its dynamics as well as the understanding of how the capital penetration affects daily life.