Lydia Chatziiakovou
Lecture: The artist as catalyst and the citizen as co-creator: alternative practices, non-formal education, community building.
Lectures at Fine Art Department on November 28 and and Ayios Theodoros, November 26, 11 a.m.
The second lecture was given as part of the one-day conference Formerly intimate Spaces, Contemporary Makers of Culture: The Country House of Adamantios Diamantis
Workshops: Art for Social Change, November 28-29, 2022
12.30, Fine Art Studios, Cyprus University of Technology
The international practice-based project Curatorial Art Academy Project involves intensive curatorial workshops featuring renowned international guest speakers from a number of distinguished institutions. The project is organized by Professor Klitsa Antoniou and the Cut Contemporary Fine Arts Lab of the Department of Fine Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology. Curatorial Art Academy Projects offer participants a program of lectures and workshops and an opportunity for them to present their curatorial ideas or their own artworks and receive feedback from invited speakers. The project will prepare participants to enhance their role as curators, will enable them to work around how to engage audiences more effectively by proposing alternative models of exhibition-making, institution-building, and social justice through art. A key objective of the project is to advance and establish a professional discourse, thereby encouraging a continuous evaluation of one's own and other's curatorial practice. It is aimed at both students and practicing artists.
Herman Bashiron Mendolicchio was the first guest of this program in 2021. In 2022 the program continues with guest Lydia Chatziiakovou, curator, Co-director of ArtBOX (www.artbox.gr). Since 2004, she co-directs ArtBOX, a creative arts management office that conceives, designs and implements contemporary art projects revolving around the exploration of art as agent of social change, based on long-term strategic planning. In this context, she conceives, curates and coordinates projects that emphasise on art for social change and the relationship between art and technology, bringing together communities, artists and institutions from Greece and abroad. Recent examples include “The New New” - Art Science Technology Festival by TIF - Helexpo, which she artistically directed (2014-2018), and “Artecitya. Envisioning the City of Tomorrow” by Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki, which she curated and coordinated (2014-2018). Between 2017-2020, she was curator and project administrator of Project LABattoir, an initiative of the Municipality of Thessaloniki, based on a concept by ArtBOX, implemented through a founding grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). In 2020-21, she curated Common Lab, a programme implemented by Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki and ArtBOX in the context of Goethe-Institut’s Excellency Initiatives 2020. Since 2020, she is member of the curatorial team of Freiraum, a European-wide platform of institutions active in the areas of arts, culture, civic engagement, education, and learning, initiated by Goethe-Institut. In 2020 and 2021 she co-curated, coordinated and hosted Freiraum Platform's hybrid festival, that included a 3-days' live online conference and exhibition, and several offline events in more than 20 cities across Europe . Currently, she is curating Tale of X Cities, a project implemented in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki and more than 20 institutions from across Northern Greece, that aims to empower local communities and develop audiences based on inclusion and democratisation of the production of culture. www.artbox.gr
ArtBOX develops and curates projects of contemporary and public art, non-formal education and digital technology in the field of culture. Their mission is to explore the role of art as an agent of social change based on long-term strategic planning in dialogue with communities and the creative industries. Lydia Chatziiakovou will present this approach through examples and good practices, as a methodology of developing and producing art that interacts with the local and the global aiming towards social innovation.
Workshop 28-29 November 2022: Art for Social Change
The workshop will focus on the artistic practice known as art for social change — or social practice, or socially engaged art. Through examples of works by internationally acclaimed artists, we will explore the methodology of the specific practice in terms of the creation of the art work as an object and/or as a process of community making, the meaningful engagement and role of community as co-creator, the correlations between symbolism, representation and artistic activism, and the tension between artistic practice and social action.
