Athens
HubKypseli Hub

Phase 1

We proposed to start a project interrogating what is the identity and the challenge posed to independent culture, locally and internationally, through podcasts and roundtables. Faced with increasing government control over mass media and decreasing funding, in Greece as elsewhere the independent arts sector is shrinking and has less and less opportunities to be heard and make its mark. Such lack of visibility in turn results in artists being considered non-essential to society as the recent, inadequate Covid-related policies demonstrated. Our project aimed to overturn the situation and create a platform of expression for independent artists and organisations that could later be expanded to include more hubs, more cities and parallel events in their spaces. The content of podcasts was curated by a different organisation each time based on our areas of expertise (books, performing arts, visual arts) and involved independent artists/organisations, journalists, activists etc. With the initial VAHA grant, we organised a community workshop on creating podcasts and roundtable sessions with journalists and artists to identify the needs of the sector; and we created seven pilot podcasts to determine the long term format of the project, our target audiences and how best to reach them.

Phase 2

Concrete Contract

in collaboration with Diyarbakır I and Tirana hubs

The sea is history.
The unity is submarine.

“Concrete Contract” is a collaboration project between Diyarbakır, Athens and Tirana hubs, trying to build an artistic relational context across places, people and their related aspirations about the concrete and concretisation of their surroundings. Looking at different sorts of nation-building processes, the making of places of belonging and identities, and the neoliberal global capitalism that both enforce and challenge the former two, the project searches for artistic and collaborative variations and mutations of the literary and visual representations of the concrete to challenge the multidirectional and all-encompassing material groundedness of the concrete and its homogenizing effects in our shared and identical spaces. Inspired by Caribbean writers, challenging the colonial history and looking for ways of reclaiming the land and the identity in its all multiplicity, the project title looks for different sorts of alignments of joy and care through artistic expression, between different histories, spaces, people, objects and discourses, challenging an imagined giant concrete construction. Opposing the “national” contracts written on the peoples of different pasts, the concrete contract works to find out what kind of multiplicities lie beneath the homogenised concrete surface, looking for creative archaeologies and shaking the ground of foundations of all kinds, handing in irony and improvisation. It’s a contract to look for ways of relations to enjoy the submarine.