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Accepted Paper:
Assemblages of Possibility: Artist-Run Spaces in Athens
Julia Tulke
(University of Rochester)
This contribution attends to artist-run spaces in the "crisis city" Athens as hybrid and ever-shifting assemblages of possibility, sites for cultivating allied solidarity, creative resilience, sustainability, and uncommon knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
Through the 2010s, a long decade bounded by the 2008 economic crisis and the 2020 pandemic rupture, the Greek capital of Athens emerged as Europe’s symbolic epicenter of crisis, a critical point of convergence for several interrelated situations unfolding across the region. Within and against these urgent conditions, the city witnessed an exceptional and unprecedented proliferation of artist-run spaces and initiatives: self-managed exhibition and performance spaces, sites devoted to artistic research, community art projects, and kindred initiatives attendant to alternative economies of practice, collaboration, and exchange. Emerging from the shared needs of a small contemporary art scene suspended between a chronic lack of public support and a commercial gallery sector decimated by the 2008 financial crisis, such endeavors are not singular interventions or autonomous bubbles; rather, they form a relational infrastructure of world-making deeply embedded in the broader currents of Athens’ urban development between the crises. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2020 and 2021, this contribution attends to Athenian artist run spaces as hybrid and ever-shifting assemblages of possibility, sites for cultivating allied solidarity, creative resilience, sustainability, and uncommon knowledge.