with AthenSYN

Universitas (“community”, lat.) is a new form of art which emerged at the refugee camps around Athens. Groups of artists and cultural organizers offered workshops in these new Syrian cities. Within our European ghetto, “Frontexed” from the outside and bitten by patrol dogs from the inside, we paradoxically experience sparks of the only possible future: no nations, no borders. We, here in Athens, do our best to create time-spaces where the irrelevance of citizenship is cultivated. Don’t call it micropolitics. Don’t write PhDs about us. Please, join. Once you are involved, you will learn how to live with the difficulties of the projects related to “refugees”. The intensity experienced in the Universitas workshops should not be expressed with the traditional means of documentation for several reasons. The participating artists created works about their truly seismic insights in the camps.

The information on the entire project can be accessed here

Along with co-initiating and co-organizing the workshops, Joulia Strauss has interviewed the newcomers and has drawn their portraits and edited the Athenian issue of the Warsaw-based magazine Krytyka Polityczna.