The route focuses on spaces associated with institutional interventions and on the details of legal texts, while attempting to link official law with what it brings to the “living” public space. At the same time, artistic interventions retrieve experiential records and minor histories in contrast to the one-dimensional space described by official plans. Meeting point: Kato Patissia ISAP Station / End of route: KET / Contributors: Route: Constantina Theodorou / Interventions-actions: Dimitris Georgakopoulos, Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Yorgia Karidi, Giorgos Papadatos, Anna Tsouloufi-Lagiou, Dimitris Halatsis, Constantinos Hadzinikolaou

The most confidential and opaque element of the operation and financial power of large cultural institutions in Greece is undoubtedly that of their funding: seats in Liechtenstein or Bermuda, a network of offshore companies… In collaboration with the journalistic team of REPORTERS UNITED, the H(e)avens Festival hosts an original activist and research workshop focused on the use of the Paradise Papers website, with an emphasis on investigating the funding of these institutions.

Costis Zouliatis (musician and researcher) and Yiannis Iolaos Maniatis (musician and classical scholar) discuss the articulation of the type of acts staged in and through the Greek cultural foundations, the projectification of artistic activity and art’s dissociation from its social, political and historical coordinates.

Pedion Areos, Athens. In front of the statue of King Constantine, Mozart, Billy, Teto, Simbone, Garida, Circe, and Dobby attempt to turn Constantine into Don Quixote. Will they succeed? The video of the action opens up a conversation about the terms of intervention in public space. To what extent is it an exclusive privilege of private initiative?

Heavens and pleasure – a suitable pairing, isn’t it? Yet in present-day Athens, access to havens is opaque and their pleasures are afforded to only a few. Drawing on the two speakers’ two years of experience with/in the artist residency Onassis AiR, this lecture-dialogue will explore how pleasures and collectivities clash with institutional demands for productivity and control. Speaking from two perspectives, inside and out, together they will ask: whose pleasure is it, after all?

A contribution that examines the linguistic uses of open calls of private institutions that perform the “promise” of transparency and openness, while in reality they contribute to job insecurity, competition and the expanding dominance of vertical hierarchy. By analyzing specific examples from the field of dance in Greece and Europe, this paper hopes to at least make visible the existing processes of ”calls”, their effects on the artistic field and working conditions.

Focusing on the format of applications for participation in artistic programmes, donations or awards in the Greek visual arts scene, ‘Apply!’ examines how institutions are personified through this specific content and how the submission process — from the beginning to the end — outlines a personal but highly political psychography of artists and the identity of institutions in Greece.

In the spring of 2015, I received “an offer I could not refuse”: to participate in the excavation of the old Faliron racecourse in order to proceed with the construction of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre. For the following five and a half months, I participated in the discovery of individual and group graves of people who had died violent deaths, therefore witnessing the worst face of antiquity but also the destructive indifference of a so-called “cultural” foundation towards the discovery of the century.

A survey of unsolicited emails—desperate attempts at programmation, sad pleas for acknowledgment—that Kowal began sending, under a pseudonym, to mainstream arts venues at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Playful though odd, their sum is a puzzling meditation on insider/outsider dynamics and more broadly on the ethics of institutional cultural production in times of crisis, insurrection, and war.

A multiform and multimedia art event as a study on the 2nd position on the philosophy of history by Walter Benjamin on the occasion of The Bound (“Desmotes”) and the Unbound in the surroundings of the SNFCC. Poetry, movement, lecture, cry. For “there is a secret agreement between the generations that have passed and ours. Are we not also touched by a breath of the air that surrounded our predecessors? Is there not an echo of those who have now been silenced in the voices that reach our ears today?”

A performance recounting the events as they historically unfolded in the three-year communications feud between FYTA and New Museum’s collaboration with DESTE foundation in 2016-2019. The project was endorsed by W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), an international organisation that fights for the rights of artists and artworkers.

A sound intervention based on agreements signed between artists and cultural foundations, with a strong improvisation component and a slightly ironic disposition.

Musical and sonic improvisation addressing the contradictions of the Athenian cultural scene. The daily inquiries of many artists blend with phrases derived from press releases and announcements of major private institutions, merging dynamically with electronic sounds. Words converge under a common roof and intertwine with a music that will never find its shelter.