The project’s vision is to introduce a collaborative scheme between artists/cultural workers currently in limbo and community members, with the aim to promote life skills development through arts and participatory creative placemaking projects (i.e. mural arts, public art etc). One of the first steps to achieve this goal is the organization of weekly training courses. The main purpose of these courses is, on the one hand to offer the chance to artists and cultural workers in limbo to act as community educators and creativity ambassadors and on the other hand to mobilize the young community members to take a more active role in their community.
At ActionAid’s Youth Centre in Thessaloniki more than 20 young community members participated in 13 courses over the past three months, delivered by 5 artists and cultural workers. These artists were:
Anna Kelermenou. She is a visual artist. She graduated from the Fine and Applied Arts faculty of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, under the supervision of prof. Ioannis Fokas and specialized in painting. Her work thematics cross over from trauma, memory, childhood, Christianity, feminism to video games and Asian culture and she explores them through traditional installation and video art mediums. Regarding the Come2art project, she oversaw the delivery of the first training module, concerning emotions regulation and emotional intelligence.
Smaro Katsaggelou is an Architect from Greece. She has been actively experimenting witth photography and video art. She has designed and implemented several exhibition and cultural projects. Her video artworks have been featured in Athens Digital Arts Festival (Museum of Greek Folk Art, Athens, 2021) and in Video Arts Projects (Municipal Gallery, Thessaloniki, 2022). She is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Conservation of Cultural Monuments (AUTh). Concerning her involvement in Come2art, she delivered the fifth training module which was about the evolvement of creative placemaking over the past decades and its main characteristics.
Giorgos Oikonomou is a film director and photographer based in Thessaloniki, Greece. He started working at the creative studio “Slab” and nowadays he runs the collaborative project “sweetfilm” (sweetfilm.gr). With sweetfilm he aims to highlight remarkable stories that need to be seen. Stories of people that became documentaries, personal stories such as film diaries and even fictional stories. All these projects have storytelling in common, that is expressed through the creative techniques of photography and video. With the experience of creating visual narrations, Giorgos came to Come2art to present the ‘Art of Storytelling’ and how it can be approached through multiple creative mediums.
Sofoklis Ambatzidis is a graphic designer with a background in physics and pedagogy. He is a paper artist, as well. His main interest is the 3d paper art. In Come2art he was the facilitator of the 4th training module which had to do with collaboration methods and practices. Besides the theoretical aspect, workshops promoting the principles of the collaboration were also implemented.
*This publication has been produced with the financial support of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission. The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
