(young) Aigaleo City

(young) Aigaleo City is the second stage of locus athens’ two-year long community project in Aigaleo (a city located in the Western suburbs of Athens).

In 2014-2015 Aigaleo City investigated the city’s history, the relevance of locality as a reference point for understanding broader urban changes, the shifting identities of community life and the role the visual arts can play in activating a city’s unknown stories.

Through a diverse program working with community members and people from a broad range of disciplines, locus athens triggered a series of situations that activated people and places throughout the city.

Having addressed the city’s past, (young) Aigaleo City will continue in the same spirit but by focusing this time on the city’s younger generations. In line with its prequel, locus athens has invited a series of collaborators to work with micro-communities aged from five to eighteen throughout the city, about their city: a theater director, a photographer and two architectural teams will work with children, through processes which will be both challenging and rewarding, asking them to tell their city’s, schools’ and community’s stories.

The theater director Dimitris Xanthopoulos working with teenagers from the 7th High School of Aigaleo will produce a devised version of “Romeo and Juliet”. Shakespeare’s text will be used as a starting-point for the students to investigate their home city as a backdrop for love, loss and rivalries, culminating in one final performance, which will use the city of Aigaleo as its stage. The workshop is part of the Shakespeare Lives program supported by the British Council.

The photographer Yannis Hadjiaslanis will co-ordinate a series of seminars with children from Aigaleo’s high schools. The students will be asked to document traces of their family’s past, their homes and city, through a series of photographic assignments.

AREA architects will research into collaborative design processes and architectural imaginaries. They will work together with the 6thprimary school of Aigaleo where, over a series of meetings, primary school children will investigate the design problems of their school. The workshop will be in collaboration with architecture students from the University of Volos and in the final session, children from Istanbul and Brussels will take part thanks to the program C.A.T.C.H (Children Architects to Create Homes) which the 6th primary school is taking part in.

Point Supreme architects will create a playground in Aigaleo where children will be invited to play face to face, transforming the dramaturgie of play into a process of exploration and discovery. The playground is being supported by the Municipality of Aigaleo.

A short documentary film on Aigaleo, ‘The City’ commissioned by locus athens and directed by Avrilios Karakostas and Ioanna Tsoukala will be presented in Aigaleo in collaboration with the Athens International Film Festival (AIFF).

A catalogue with documentation and archives from the two-year project will also be published, designed by Vasso Plavou.

(Young) Aigaleo City is one of NEON’s Community Projects for 2016, part of NEON’s initiative to bring art projects into the city’s neighborhoods. ΝΕΟΝ Community Projects have been taking place since 2013 and are based on the participation of residents, groups and artists from Athenian neighborhoods. These Projects are a vital field of artistic activity, through which artists, alongside with citizens, highlight the issues that concern these local communities.