Forum

Vassilis Arapoglou

Missing links in the creative city: Strangers and the caring of pain

The starting point of this presentation will be the reception of Oedipus at Colonus; the stranger par excellence in ancient drama. The presentation aims to problematize competing mentalities guiding urban policies for the reception and inclusion of strangers. Reflecting on the findings of recent research, the presentation highlights the political challenges that strangers pose for sustaining creativity, learning and caring.

Pavlos-Marinos Delladetsimas

Social, economic, political and cultural exclusion in Athens and Greece

Athens will be presented focusing in particular on its social, economic, political and cultural fragmentations, emphasising the exclusionary dynamics in time of crisis.

Marianna D’Ovidio

The creative city does not exist

Introduction on the topic, with particular relevance to processes of exclusion that arose in the creative city, but also on mechanisms of inclusion.

Michael Janoschka

CONTESTED CITIES – Pathways to autonomy?

The intervention will discuss how and up to which degree contemporary housing struggles in Southern European and Latin American cities may be understood as contested pathways to construct autonomy in our cities. It will address how we may reflect upon housing struggles as a way and means to overcome the structural (and hidden) violence of capitalist accumulation, and as a method to construct new subjectivities that effectively dispute the mechanisms of the neoliberal city.

Left Hand Rotation

Gentrification is not the name of a lady,

Left Hand Rotation is an artistic collective active since 2005 that develop projects that articulate intervention, appropriationism, recording and video. Since 2010 they have developed the project “Gentrification is not a name of a lady”, which addresses the problems associated with the processes of gentrification, using methodologies which combine information, artistic practice and direct action, based on observation and theoretic and academic study.

Ariadni Lignou Tsamantani

From the “sacred” marbles of the nation to the former industrial buildings of the city:Redefining the orientation of the Athens Festival, reapproaching ancient drama

In 2006, a period of aesthetic innovation began for the Athens Festival. This new chapter in the history of the Festival was also signified by the change of its main venue (from the Odeon of Herodes Atticus to the former industrial buildings at Peiraios 260). Taking into account the ideological aspects of the reception of ancient drama in the history of the Athens & Epidaurus Festival, the present paper will focus on the few performances of ancient drama at the Athens Festival during the last decade: what is the possible (even if only symbolic) contribution of these performances towards a new approach to the ancient drama, still within an institutional context but free of the ‘visible’ burden of the past?

Afroditi Mitsopoulou

The performance ‘Pelelopes’.

The main axis of the performance is the conversation between contemporary testimonies and ancient texts. It will be presented the way of taking , transforming, comparing the testimonies with the ancient texts, the reflections and internal conflicts that emerged from their stage performance, as well as the process in which a self-organized neighborhood choir was the foundation of a professional performance.

Dimitris Bampilis

Pedi-festation: the collective walk strategic as performative practice

The intervention will describe a series of examples of collective walks in the urban space, through Michel de Certeau’s prism and practice.

Angeliki Poulou

Representations of the city in the contemporary Greek Tragedy productions in the digital theatre

Directors and theatrical groups experiment with new media, with new structures of interpretation, of perception and experience of art. The use of digital technology in the stage approach of ancient Greek tragedy is highly revealing the contemporary culture, and the ways how the notions of the city, of the community, of the collectivity are experienced and represented today. 

Argyris Pandazaras

The performance Metropolis

Recomposing ancient drama’s elements. Methodological tools, conceptualization and stage production

Marc Pradel

Social innovative practices in the creative city

In the contemporary city, many artists and artistic communities are strongly excluded from the creative and cultural scene of the city. However, sometimes they can put in practice a series of actions that are at the edge between inclusion, empowerment, and the building of new voices. With the theoretical reference to social inclusion, the discussion will focus on these inclusive practices.

Ioanna Remediaki

Strangers in the city

The work follows some aspects of the Greek tragedy, where the ideas of the city and the otherness, the public/common and the strange, are remarkably joined together. On the contrary, the present idea of the stranger has been provocatively accused and distorted.

Eleni Riga

Stage of Revolution introduces to the public the artwork Monument to Revolution by Sanja Iveković at square Dourouti in Metaxourgeio in the frame of documenta 14 as a platform of workers, feminists and antifascists struggles. In parallel, it connects the artwork with the stage of ancient theatre as a tool for democratic expression and underlines the role of women’s mediation.

George Rodosthenous

Updating “Women of Troy” using verbatim material:  Composing the “real” in the adaptation of the classical

This Presentation will discuss the organic incorporation of verbatim material to replace the choral odes in Rodosthenous’ production of The Women of Troy (Leeds, 2016). Compositional techniques will be contextualised as a methodological tool for providing a contemporary relevance and will be linked to ‘forced displacement’ as an act of violence.

Paul Routledge

Space Invaders: Spatial Strategies and Sites of Intervention in Urban Commons

This presentation discusses the commons from the perspective of a strategic spatial approach. Four key spatial strategies are considered with key material examples from the past decade. Such spatial strategies also involve sites of activist intervention: physical or conceptual sites within a system where pressure can be put to disrupt its smooth functioning and commons can be articulated. Brief examples are presented

Stavros Stavridis

The City as Commons: exploring the potentialities of common space

The process of defining and maintaining the common in and through city life is a process of collective inventiveness. Rules of sharing are being tested in practice, and collective experiences are being evaluated in the course of sustaining new habits. Concrete experiences of sharing happen in the multileveled space-time of the city. Those concrete experiences may sustain but also uproot habits. It is the potentialities of human collaboration and exchanges that are being developed in such concrete urban experiences. Reconstituting urban virtuality (as defined by H. Lefebvre) through commoning would mean confronting predominant urban enclavism. This would entail both the re-appropriation of the urban sea as well as the opening of urban enclosures which produce and sustain urban islands in the contemporary urban archipelago. Practices of commoning develop osmotic relations between different ways of urban existence establishing thus threshold areas of negotiation. But isn’t the experience of the theatrical space actually based on a similar attempt to create passages to otherness, osmotic relations between the actual and the possible?

Eleni Tzoumaka

Uses of the past in city branding: The case of Athens

Athens is undelibly branded by her ancient past. The city’s “discovery” by European travellers, during the last decades of the 17^th century, resulted to its acknowledgment as the birthplace of European civilization. The city’s monuments are worshipped ever since as unrivalled masterpieces. The symbolic place of Athens in Europeans’ imagery played a significant role in its declaration as capital of the newly established Greek state in 1833. The myth of classical Athens was from the beginning in contradiction to the real city and Greeks are even today constantly compared to their idealized ancestors. Using the experience of the 2004 Olympic Games as a starting point, I will examine the role of the past in building the brand name “Athens” in the 21^st century.

Haris Tsavdaroglou

City Branding vs City Commoning. The Tourists’ or the Refugees’ Right to the City?  

During the last years cities figured as exemplary places for neoliberal urban policies which tend to appropriate the common space through city branding, touristification, airbnbfication, gentrification, creative economy and experience economy. At the same time the newly arrived refugees are settled in State-run camps that is overcrowded dilapidated factories and old military bases in the outskirts of the cities. However in many cases the refugees themselves self-organize, occupy abandoned buildings in the city core, enact the production of collective common spaces and claim the right to the city. Consequently the discourse on right to the city and on common space has to be reconsidered, as it is becoming the hybrid arena of urban conflicts.

Panos Charalambous

Voice-o-graph

Two audio essays. Excerpt from Charalambous’ artwork presented in Documenta14, referring to events that took place during the military junta in Greece 1967-1973.

Alexander Vasudevan

From Agonism to Autonomy: Notes on the History of Urban Squatting

In this paper, I re-trace the recent history of urban squatting in Europe and North America building on arguments set out in my book, The Autonomous City. The paper draws particular attention to the spatial practices of squatters and the remaking of the urban as a theatre of protest. In so doing, it highlights the relationship between architecture and performance.

Georgia Alexandri

Georgia Alexandri is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). She is interested in researching urban processes of dispossession that deprive people from exercising the right to the city. Her current interests focus on processes of housing financialisation, looking on the way household debt is increasingly becoming an investment vehicle.

Athina Arampatzi

Architect and Urbanist, currently associated to the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain as a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research interests broadly focus on urban politics and social movements developing in cities. Athina’s work includes the politics of the everyday and subversive bottom-up practices of social movements that have developed vis-à-vis austerity in the post-crisis period, the spatial politics of solidarity articulated among the grassroots and alternative socio-economic relations constituted through practices of commοning. Athina has published her work in academic journals such as Urban Studies, Environment and Planning and Political Geography.

Vassilis Arapoglou

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Crete

His research and teaching concentrates on the critical analysis of urban and social policies, residential segregation, poverty, migration and social exclusion. He is editor of European Urban and Regional Studies. Recent book Contested landscapes of poverty and homelessness in Southern Europe, Macmillan Palgrave.

Pavlos-Marinos Delladetsimas

Professor at the Department of Geography Harokopio University Athens. Has worked as a researcher at the National Technical University of Athens. Subsequently he worked as a researcher at IFRESI/CNRS (Lille-Fr). He has been teaching and collaborating with numerous post graduate programmes in Greece (Department of Geography University of the Aegean, Department of Geography Harokopio University, NTUA) and in Europe (University College London, Universita degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, ASRO-Faculty of Engineering KU Leuven, Département Aménagement Ecole Polytechnique-Université François Rabelais de Tours).

Marianna d’Ovidio

Sociologist and assistant professor in the Department of Political Sciences of the Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro. Her research interests focus on culture, social innovation and creativity, and their connections with local development and urban space. She has been involved in international studies of social innovation, cultural economy and urban transformation. Her publications include The creative city does not exist. Critical essays on the creative and cultural economy of cities (2016) and «Social innovation and institutionalisation in the cognitive-cultural economy: two contrasting experiences from Southern Europe», in Cities 33 (2013), with Marc Pradel.

Michael Janoschka is University Academic Fellow in Critical Urban Transformations at the School of Geography of the University of Leeds. His research focuses on the comparative approaches to gentrification, displacement and dispossession in the contemporary city, on the social exclusion, financialisation of housing markets and urban contestation , on the migration, citizenship and the transformation of local politics in post-crisis scenarios. His regional expertise comprises Latin American and Southern European cities, with a special focus on Madrid and Athens. For more than 15 years he has been developing extensive research in Latin America, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico. He is the scientific coordinator of the interdisciplinary Contested Cities network.

Effi Yannopoulou.  Born in Athens in 1967, she studied Psychology and Literary Translation and recently did a M.A. in Gender Studies. She works as a translator from French, Spanish and English, translating mainly prose, theater and essays from the field of humanities. In recent years she has collaborated, and still does, with magazines and newspapers, publishing book and theater reviews and articles on cultural and political issues. For three years she was involved in the art squat of Embros Theater in Athens.

Left Hand Rotation is an artistic collective active since 2005 that develop projects that articulate intervention, appropriationism, recording and video. Since 2010 they have developed the project Gentrification is not a name of a lady, which addresses the problems associated with the processes of gentrification, using methodologies which combine information, artistic practice and direct action, based on observation and theoretic and academic study.

Ariadni Lignou-Tsamantani

Ariadni Lignou Tsamantani is a PhD Candidate in Theatre Studies at the Freie Universtität Berlin. Her PhD project explores the question of national identity in contemporary Greek theatre. Her research is supported by the state of Berlin’s Elsa-Neumann-Scholarship. Ariadni holds an MA in International Performance Research from the University of Amsterdam and the University of Warwick, an MA in Modern Greek Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin and a BA in Theatre Studies from the University of Athens.

Evi Nakou

Evi Nakou is a flutist, sound artist and workshop leader. She is a co-founder of ontoSonics, an arts collective specialized in site-determined installation and performance, based on storytelling. In 2013 she formed plein, an intermedia collaboration with visual artist Daphne Sgourou, researching and creating work between the UK and Greece. In 2015, Evi curated, together with Jane Cheadle, the peer-led Participatory Arts Reading Group, at the Barbican. Since 2016 Evi is leading the Learning and Participation Department of the Greek National Opera.

Thanasis Moutsopoulos

Associate Professor of History of Art and Cultural Theory. He studied at the National Technical University. Master of Design Studies, Harvard University, PhD NTUA. PhD N.T.U.A. He had collaborated with many reviews (Mute, Archis,…) He was appointed commissioner for the Greek Pavilion (Athens 2002: Absolut Realism) at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2002). He was the artistic director for the Photosyngyria exhibition, an international photography event in Thessaloniki, Greece (February 2005) and Visual Arts in Greece 2005 at the Contemporary Art Museum in Thessaloniki. He curated a great number of group shows in several museums in Greece. Recent international publications: Red Utopia: North Korea and On Cultural Influence (ed. Steven rand, Heather Kouris).

Afroditi Mitsopoulou

Aphrodite Mitsopoulou has studied architecture, theater and music. She lives and works in Athens as an actress. Penelopes  is her third theatre production and is based on interviews with women refugees and immigrants, who have told their story especially in the context of this performance, as well as ancient texts related to the Trojan War (Trojan Women, Iliad, Odyssey). Penelopes will be staged again,  in October 2017, at the TV Control Center.

Dimitris Bampilis 

Director, dramaturg. He is interested in performing arts through a multidisciplinary practice connected to theory and research with an emphasis on their relation with the social reality and the urban experience. He has collaborated with the National Theatre of Northern Greece, Patras Municipal and Regional Theatre, and the groups Per-Theater-Formance, BelleVille Collective and ODC ensemble among others. His collaboration with Vasilis Papavasileiou (GR), Wlodzimierz Staniewski (PL), La Pocha Nostra (MEX/USA), Marina Abramović and with the documentary-theatre collective Rimini Protokoll (GER) in Berlin, has until now marked his vision for theatre.

Argyris Pandazaras

He was born in Volos in 1988. He graduated from the National Theatre Drama School in 2010. In 2016, he was awarded the “Dimitris Horn” Best Young Actor award. He has worked with the: Greek National Theatre, Picolo Theatro di Milano, Onassis Cultural Center, Thessaloniki Concert Hall, Athens and Epidaurus Festival, Piraeus Municipal Theatre, “Nea Skini” Lefteris Vogiatzis Theatre, Porta and Vasilakou Theatre. He has also worked with some of the most distinguished international and Greek directors : Tomaz Pandur, Bob Wilson, Dimitris Papaioannou, Lefteris Vogiatzis, Mihail Marmarinos, Giannis Houvardas, Nikos Karathanos Ektoras Lygizos Dimitris Karatzas, Katerina Evagelatou, Roula Pateraki, Lydia Koniordou. He has directed : The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, Amors, a performance based on William Shakespeare’s sonnets, Metropolis, a performance based on five Greek tragedies (Little Theatre of Epidaurus and Synchrono Theatre in Athens).

Angeliki Poulou

Curator and theorist of Media and Performance Art. The PhD thesis she will be defending in December 2017  is about new media and Greek Tragedy, as a PhD researcher (Co-direction: University Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III. She has been working as a tutor at Université de Nantere-Paris 10).  As curator, she is member of the artistic collective Medea Electronique. Angeliki is the content curator of  the EU programme Ancient drama: interdisciplinary and cross-arts approaches held by Michael Cacoyannis Foundation.

Marc Pradel

Marc Pradel has participated in European and Spanish research projects on citizenship, social inequalities, economic development and governance in European cities. His main research fields have been how European cities are governed to balance economic competitiveness and social cohesion. He Became professor of sociology in the University of Barcelona in 2009 and obtained his PhD in 2012. In his latest research, he has focused on innovation and creativity in cities and metropolitan regions, analysing creative actions from artists, neighbours, and excluded groups to face social exclusion. The results of his research have been published in indexed journals (Current Sociology, Urban studies, Environment and Planning C…) and in books from international publishers. www.changingcities.net

Ioanna Remediaki

Ioanna Remediaki holds an MA in Classical Literature and a BA and PhD in Theatre Studies (thesis: “The translations of Sophocles’ Antigone’ for the Modern Greek Stage (1850-2000)”). She is Lecturer of Greek Drama, Department of Theatre Studies, University of Athens. She has written, directed and performed the plays: The Table, Vacuum’s Excavation, Museum Stories, Space Hamlet, Sweet Ophelia, Sacred Way 2 and Chorico in Greece, Italy and Germany, in theatres, museums, festivals and open public spaces.

Eleni Riga

Eleni Riga is an assistant curator at documenta 14, an independent curator and co-founder of the art & research platform hdkepler.net. She studied contemporary art history and curating (Sciences et Techniques de exposition at Université Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne) and has  collaborated with many institutions in Paris and in Athens such as Gb Agency, Palais de Tokyo and Kadist Art Foundation among others. Through HD Kepler she focuses on the notion of the economy of gaze, experimentation, cultural translation, anthropology of images and remediation. The projects take different forms: bi-annual publication, exhibitions, poetic lectures, workshops and are based on the agency of the participants. She has collaborated with a number of art initiatives such as Atelier W, Bikini, Fenêtre Project, Kostanet, Kunsthalle Tropical, New Scenario, Recto/verso and Montecristo Project,  Snehta Residency among others.

George Rodosthenous

Dr George Rodosthenous is Associate Professor in Theatre Directing at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries of the University of Leeds since 2002. He has been the Director of Enterprise and Knowledge Transfer for the School from 2009-2012. George is the Artistic Director of the theatre company Altitude North and also works as a freelance director/composer for the theatre. His research interests are : the body in performance, refining improvisational techniques and compositional practices for performance, devising pieces with live musical soundscapes as interdisciplinary process, updating Greek Tragedy and The British Musical.

Paul Routledge

Professor of Contentious Politics and Social Change at the School of Geography, University of Leeds. His research interests include critical geopolitics, climate change, social justice, civil society, the environment, and social movements. He has long-standing research interests concerning development, environment and the practices of social movements in the Global South, particularly South Asia and Southeast Asia, and in the Global North. In particular, his research has been concerned with two key areas of interest: the spatiality of social movements in the Global South and Global North; and the practical, political and ethical challenges of scholar activism.

Nicolas Salazar

Chilean author, researcher and digital artist. His work is transdisciplinary, and focuses on various aspects of movement including: movement and representation (writing, notating, mathematizing movement); movement and social agency (social choreography, psycho-geography, walk-talk) and movement as ecocultural form of mediation. He is the author of many books, essays, and creative writing works. He is currently University Academic Fellow in Digital Performance at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries of the University of Leeds (UK).

Stavros Stavridis

Αrchitect and activist, is professor of design and architectural theory at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, where he teaches graduate courses on housing design (including social housing), as well as a postgraduate course on the meaning of metropolitan experience. He has published numerous articles on spatial theory. His most recent book is Common Space. The City as Commons (2016). His research is currently focused on emancipating spatial practices and on experiences and forms of urban commoning.

Haris Tsavdaroglou

Haris Tsavdaroglou is a Doctor in Urban and Regional Planning, School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) and his thesis title is “Commons and Enclosures: Dialectic Approach of Space”. Over the years, he researched on different aspects of spatial and urban issues such as common space, the right to the city, city branding, place marketing, urban commons, migration, housing, city ambiance, land grabbing, urban and regional social movements. Haris has participated in several conferences, symposiums and workshops, as well as he has published and co-edited books and articles in scientific peer-reviewed journals, collective volumes and conference proceedings.

Eleni Tzoumaka

Eleni Tzoumaka. Born in Athens. PhD from the National and Capodistrian University of Athens (NCUA). Researcher. Partner of the Department of Communication and Media Studies (NCUA).Her research interests focus on Urban and Cultural Studies, ideology, history and development of Athens’ city, Cultural Management and Cultural Diplomacy. She has given lectures and seminars at the Department of Communication and Media Studies (NCUA), the Panteion University and the Diplomatic Academy of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Author of: Cultural Diplomacy: International Practices and Greek Perspectives, I. Sideris Publications, Athens, 2005. 

Panos Charalampous

Panos Charalambous was born in Akarnania in 1956. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Athens (atelier N.Kessanlis). He has participated in outstanding exhibitions in Greece and abroad. He is professor and Rector at the School of Fine Arts in Athens.

Alexander Vasudevan

Associate Professor at the School of Geography and the
Environment at University of Oxford. His research interests combine cultural
and historical geography and urban studies with a commitment to experimental
artistic practices and grassroots social activism. Alex’s work explores, in
particular, the city as a site of political contestation drawing on a range
of methods (archival, ethnographic and participatory). He is the author of
The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting,
Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin
and co-editor of Geographies of Forced
Evictions: Dispossession, Violence, Insecurity. He has
written for the Guardian, openDemocracy and New Left Project.

FORUM CONTESTED CITIES ATHENS 2017

Ancient Greek Drama and Urban Studies

September 23^th-24^th, 2017