when you start doing community, tech and art projects

5/October/2018. Project diary.

Yesterday was a big click for me in terms of the project. At one point during the long long day of going through excel sheets, writing press releases, talking about the unconference and feeling incredibly admin inundated in the process, sweet Janus crawled! It is as Chrystalleni told me a big milestone in children’s development. Later on, amidst discussion on the unconference, we started talking about Marc Leger’s visit. I remembered Thrasos and Marc’s conversation about the relationship between the creative and activist-NGO worker parallelism and my conversation with Natalia in regards to the funding of programs of civic involvement and their shift to the support of cultural actions.

Perhaps unrelated but what I found to be interesting was that the potentiality in what we are doing at the moment is bringing into the discussion the use of tech into this frame of convolution of artistic and civic action and what that means. Has our image-virtual-physical  understanding of the social world transformed to such an extent, through our living through the lens and the screen, that we need more digital and image related mechanisms to trigger grassroots action? Is it more because civic action mobilization becomes a bit diluted or less militant once you bring such intense creative angles into the mix?

I am still trying to process how we can understand multiple connectivities and nodes. But what I feel is certain is that through the makerspace a context is developed where the three threads presented above, creative, tech and activism/NGO questions around contemporary class issues intertwine. The makerspace is underneath the Open School of Lakatamia and the Community centre which hosts the municipality’s elderly, young people and other social groupings. The placement of the makerspace there seems to me almost serendipitous because what could be more exciting than placing such a space in the heart of a suburban residential area that has little to no access to this type of setup?

Afterthought- Connecting it to the past

When we started to talk about making a hologram for an exhibition.
Me and Athina in an electronics shop by Chrystalleni. Re Aphrodite' Kitchen. Planites, Paphos 2017
Download the book- https://www.reaphrodite.org/words-of-transition-ebook