From my notebook

Athens, day 1

Twixt Lab
anthropology
Combination of everyday life and visual art 

Art and revolution and link between them

Activism 

We try to involve media in our projects

Discursive attitude, themes come from our own interests 

Never ending process, long term research

What is the difference between artist and anthropologist?
Place for experimentation

Funding, private funding
Contemporary art has been valued for the first time in Athens after the crises

Athens School of Fine Arts, Circuits & Currents (project space)
Initiating

Educational program

Student run project space

Splitting the responsibilities   

Things are easier on paper than in practice 

Before the crises art scene was very commercial
Supervising, power of supervising

Funding is crucial.

Share the interest, share the power!

Money talks. 

Institutions are heavy machines to operate. 

Green Park
Social, political, anarchist squat

Heart of crisis

Occupation

Local audience

Difficulty of documenting

No press releases 

Documentation in a collective way.

Athens, day 2

Walking, chatting, smelling, observing, asking (too personal questions), complaining, analyzing, listening, trusting, exploring.

Athens, day 3

Kostis Stafylakis

New form of nationalism, current forms of nationalism

Variations of patriotism

Language of multitude

Crisis of capitalism, crisis of democracy, alienated by the crisis

National and orientalist perspective, appropriation

Imaginary communities and notions

False conscience of victim and victimizing

“Greece cannot be the epicentre of monovalent politics for neoliberalism.”

Athens, day 4

(Un)Finished / Maria Lalou and Skafte Aymo-Boot
Contemporary archeology

Concrete
Anti monument

Ghost city

Skeletons of the buildings

Structures

Archiving

Bureaucracy

Modern Athens

Burden of the antiquity

Connection to the modernism

Personal stories, family matters

Christos Chrissopoulos
The Antiquity does not exist, it is an artefact.

Counter narratives

Fair trade producing and publishing

Misreadings

Dangerous literature

Bringing stories from history, contemporary interpretation.

THE FIRST DAY IN ATHENS

TWIXTlab

Meeting with the collectives members Elpida Rikou, Giorgos Stamantas, Sofia Grigoriadiou, Fotini Gouseti, Dimitra Kondylatou

Twixt: shortened version of betwixt, which means in between or neither the one, nor the other. The social anthropologist Victor Turner used the phrase betwixt and between in order to characterize the intermediate out of three stages of the rite of passage as ultimate transitional, subversive and creative moment of societies’ lifetime.

The TWIXTlab collective, which can also be considered an activist initiative, is situated between contemporary art and anthropology and it. They started as a lose association and now are a legal entity in order to get funding and be sustainable although all members maintain jobs to fund the space as well as their projects. They organise seminars, workshop, walks and other project that combine art and anthropology for example the “Learning form Documenta” program that is the counter to Documenta 14’s theme “Learning from Athens”.

Athens School of Fine Arts / Circuits & Currents (project space)

Meeting with the coordinator Nikos Arvanitis and recent graduates Lefteris Chrysalis & Kasiani Goulakou.

For 3 years the students have run the project space that worked as a tool for them to curate their own events program. The focus has been on building a collaborative educational program and not so much on making exhibitions. The funding for the program came for DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) initiating cooperation with the Munich School of Fine Arts. At the moment the challenge is the find funding because the existing grant ended in the Dec 2016.

Green Park

Meeting with the members Gigi Argyropoulou and Kostas Tzimoulis

The group started in 2011 with the occupation of a theatre space in Athens during which the group created a program lasting for 10 days and included interventions from more than 100 artists. Interventions were organized in the here and now, reflecting on moments of togetherness. The group is not just looking to occupy spaces but also looking to question the function of the existing space. The group creates a diverse program of performances and events in order to better utilize and thus occupy the space.

The group currently occupies a building which was the first nightclub in Athens and has gradually extended their occupation into the park. The Green Park can  also be seen as a space in the hart of the crisis.