Seminar Week Athens

The trip from Zurich to Athens took almost 48 hours and followed a long tradition of slow traveling as a form of education. While spending time together on train and boat we not only followed the footsteps of students and architects who travelled before us, we also crossed paths with people who are trying to get into Europe reluctantly and in complete anonymity. It is where all these trajectories intersect and start to overlap, where NEWROPE begins.

Communitism became our Headquarter Space for the week where we reconvened every evening as a whole group. Communication is a project located in the Metaxourgeio neighbourhood of Athens which seeks to restore dilapidated buildings through community use.

Starting the first days on the roof terrace of Hotel Orion, we were guided through Exarchia, across Victoria square, the historical center and the harbor of Piraeus by local experts on thematic walks.

Architect Constantina Theodorou of the National University of Athens and Co-Hab Athens guided us through Exarcheia. In addition to its long tradition of activism, the neighbourhood displays the development of the Polykatoikia typology from historical examples of classical modernism to the present day. Stavros Stavrides, architect activist and Professor National Technical University of Athens, showed us around the Campus of the School of Architecture. Together with Tonia Katerini, architect and member of the association of Αrchitects, we strolled through the historic center and visited the former Bageion Hotel. After being left abandoned for years it reopened in 2015 as part of the Athens Biennale. With Nikos Belavilas, Katerina Christoforaki and Polina Prentou, we visited the Port of Piraeus. After the 2013 Internation Monetary Bailout, Greece had to privatize a large number of governmental assets and was forced to sell various (air)ports, utilities and other state-owned assets. Since then it has become the second largest port in the Mediterranean and an important location within the so-called Belt and Road initiative, a global development strategy adopted by the Chinese government involving infrastructure development projects and investments in 152 countries.

“Europe reproduces itself in local daily routines and scripts of practices that build relations between people and people and things. The taxi-driver drives the taxi, the server keeps a website running, the barista orders new espresso from the retailer in the port, the fisherman is fishing according EU catch quota of tuna, the architect hires a contractor that brings a crane, the homeless begs for money and collects things to build a shelter, the kitchen chef refills the fridge with fresh products from the market, the musician records a song in a studio with software on a computer, the researcher controls the vacuum that keeps the microbes in the lab and and the baker bakes a daily bread.

Accompanying these Every-day experts means to experience the situations, to become an active part of those networks of micro practices and to engage with your hands, heads and hearts and to observe, reflect and note at the same time. Sometimes routines fail, action scrips render useless and new practices need to appear. Greece and Athens have gone to period of disruptions and most people needed to come up with alternatives. Hence Newrope might appear in: ’What people do, what people know and the things people make and use.‘ (Spradley) Be curious and discover the practices, routines and things involved.” (Text by Ben Pohl)

The format of documentation of the seminar week were individual mobile phone video diaries of 1 minutes per day to reflect on Newrope in Athens. Each student produced 5 videos of 60 seconds each during the course of the week. For the final performance we collectively produced a 15 minute. Each one of them showed the one for him or her most meaningful minute. For this, they chose the setting within Communitism themselves and one after the other handed over a portable projector. By choosing different rooms, sizes and positions, the screening became a very divers spatial experience including the whole building.

[Date] Seminar Week Fall 2019

[Team] Charlotte Schaeben & Ben Pohl (organization), Seppe De Blust, Falma Fshazi, Lukas Fink, Freek Persyn, Michiel van Iersel

[Students] Laura Seraina Berther, Liam Buffat, Béla Dalcher, Raphaela Dudler, Cindy Gloggner, Loic Godon, Maxime Jacot, Marco Landert, Carolina Palos Mas, Lukas Ryffel, Céline Ryffel, Robert Friedrich Josef Schrammen, Leart Sejdiu, Sofia Uribe Gomez

[Contributors / Guests] Prof. V. Pappas, Theodora Papamichail, Natassa Dourida, Prof. T. Maloutas, Prof. A. Deffner, Constantina Theodorou, Stefania Gyftopoulou, Prof. Stavros Stavrides, Tonia Katerini, Sofia Dona, Nikos Belavilas