24.09.2016 / time to be confirmed
Athens Conservatory, 17- B’&, Leoforos Vasileos Georgiou, Athens, Greece
Keynote
IDEAS CITY Athens, in partnership with NEON Foundation
September 19–25, 2016
IDEAS CITY Athens is conceived in partnership with NEON Foundation, a nonproit group devoted to broadening the appreciation, understanding, and creation of contemporary art in Greece. Like IDEAS CITY Detroit, the Athens program will be organized around a global studio laboratory—a five-day series of workshops, site visits, lectures, and discussions with local experts, including artists, designers, policymakers, and community members—followed by a public presentation and a conference. Participants in the laboratory will be selected through an open call process and will work together to develop ideas and strategies that respond to the challenges facing the city of Athens.
IDEAS CITY Detroit and IDEAS CITY Athens will bring together researchers, artists, and designers in intensive studio laboratory environments to develop ideas and strategies in response to the urgent challenges facing each of these urban centers. Both cities represent something of a paradox in that they each embody a specific condition of exacerbated urban crisis: Detroit is a city emerging from recent bankruptcy while struggling with widespread decay and social inequality, and Athens is the capital of a nation ravaged by economic depression and strained by a massive in ow of refugees. Yet, precisely for these reasons, Detroit and Athens have become the focus of considerable international attention from both the media and cultural organizations, and they have taken these conditions of crisis as opportunities to reafirm their positions as vibrant sites of cultural production and innovation.
Building on the success of the initiative’s past IDEAS CITY festivals in New York and global conferences from São Paulo to Istanbul, this international program will culminate in IDEAS CITY New York, organized around the event 100 Ideas for the Future City.