Opportunities: Open Call (Thessaloniki, Greece) Deadline – June 30th 2024

The international Eye’s Walk Digital Festival and the MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art embark on a unique collaboration: The quite new Thessaloniki International Digital Arts Festival (THEDAF) is sought to expand the concept of heritage and become a meeting point for contemporary art with the public history of Thessaloniki today, through digital art, performance, circus art, and psychogeographical wandering.

We invite participants to share affective atmospheres and personal and collective experiences around the city, its connection with the rest of the world and ultimately its future.
Because the future for us is never merely idealistic or local but encompasses action and the possibility of coexistence with the world.

Encouraging participants to create through multiple voices and perspectives and uncensored emotions, we urge them to:

• Collaborate multidimensionally with other artists, thinkers, activists, and communities.
• Explore uncharted parallels, asynchronous encounters to broaden the notion and framework of what we call a place’s heritage.
• Express themselves and their worldview, exploring the vulnerability of art in public spaces, surpassing the artist alone to create spaces for meetings and collaborations.
• Be playful, bold and relevant by “connecting” the psychological, emotional, social, and political atmospheres of Thessaloniki, with our world and the present time.
• Tune into the Affective Atmospheres of Thessaloniki, the way the body feels its own emotions. “Atmospheres” that concern the geographical, historical and emotional space of the “Thessaloniki International Fair” are particularly welcome.

Information about artistic works:

• Digital works submitted can have a maximum duration of five (5) minutes.
• Performances can have a maximum duration of thirty (30) minutes.
• Proposals concerning Audio Routes, as described below, have flexibility in their duration.
• Proposals combining artistic work with educational activities will also be included in the final production.

What we provide to selected participants:

• The festival will provide accommodation for artists in Thessaloniki and partially support their transportation.
• A compensation of euros 150 will be provided to selected artworks.
• We facilitate artists’ contacts, if desired, with local artistic groups, residents, and communities.
• (*) The entirety or part of the specific production will also be presented in the new metaverse (digital and three-dimensional) environment of the Eye’s Walk Digital Festival, available to the public on a special platform.
• The Eye’s Walk festival team and curator Filia Milidaki, in collaboration with MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, are responsible for curation and artistic supervision.

Spaces – points of inspiration and artistic creation

Artistic activities will unfold in spaces of MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, spaces of the Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF), and in spaces of cultural and collaborating entities of Thessaloniki (to be announced at the end of the Open Call).

• Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF): a dialectical landscape

TIF constitutes a vital space in Thessaloniki, with commercial and political implications for the city and Greece. However, due to its specific use – mainly for commercial purposes – the pulses of the city and its residents have not permeated this location, despite its central location. What are the possible new stories of this space? Instead of seeing it as a space we already know through a memory-screen, we dare to explore new perspectives beyond the relationships that define it.

• Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF): an inter-artistic space. The art of contemporary circus along with digital art.

While the art of contemporary circus is internationally popular, it remains relatively underdeveloped in Greece. Our country lacks accredited schools or artistic tradition, although the few circus artists in Greece are exceptional and beloved.

The innovation of the above action is based on combining European expertise in the art of contemporary circus with the experimentation of the Eye’s Walk Digital Festival in digital art and public space.

Circus is related to TIF and the public memory of the city, as the presentation of international circus artists in its facilities was widespread and highly anticipated until the 1970s.

• MOMus: Sensory wanderings/ Routes within the museum’s spaces

Participants are invited to create wanderings, routes (auditory, visual, verbal, performative, and combinations thereof) that will evolve within the MOMus spaces. These can constitute a new map of the affective atmospheres of the city and our world, inspired by the museum itself.

Routes can incorporate a variety of media such as verbal text, music, sounds, video art, sound art, oral narratives of the city’s residents, etc.

Submission of works via the form here: https://forms.gle/9Rk68xZGVs5U6fgF7

Submission deadline until June 30, 2024.

For inquiries, send us a message at [email protected]

At this link, you can find material to understand the curatorial approach of the artistic production: “Thessaloniki: Affective Atmospheres (Part 1)”
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8xikb18avpqe8t0xo2duw/Material-to-understand-the-curatorial-approach.pdf?rlkey=ah2cijxrjhhmkf8xgqkaogkbn&dl=0

THEDAF is based on an idea by the Eye’s Walk Digital Festival and is supported by the Eye’s Walk Digital Festival and the MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art.

For more information about the Eye’s Walk Digital Festival, you can find here: https://www.eyeswalk.gr/index.php/el/ and here: https://www.youtube.com/@eyeswalkdigitalfestivaleye418/videos

For more information about MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, you can find here: https://www.momus.gr/museum/museum-contemporary-art