Respublika! Experiments in the performance of participation and democracy edited by Nico Carpentier 1 2 3 Publisher NeMe, Cyprus, 2019 www.neme.org © 2019 NeMe Design by Natalie Demetriou, ndLine. Printed in Cyprus by Lithografica ISBN 978-9963-9695-8-6 Copyright for all texts and images remains with original artists and authors Respublika! A Cypriot community media arts festival was realised with the kind support from: main funder other funders in collaboration with support Further support has been provided by: CUTradio, Hoi Polloi (Simon Bahceli), Home for Cooperation, IKME Sociopolitical Studies Institute, Join2Media, KEY-Innovation in Culture, Education and Youth, Materia (Sotia Nicolaou and Marina Polycarpou), MYCYradio, Old Nicosia Revealed, Studio 21 (Dervish Zeybek), Uppsala Stadsteater, Chystalleni Loizidou, Evi Tselika, Anastasia Demosthenous, Angeliki Gazi, Hack66, Limassol Hacker Space, and Lefkosia Hacker Space. Respublika! Experiments in the performance of participation and democracy edited by Nico Carpentier viii Contents Foreword xv An Introduction to Respublika! Experiments in the Performance of 3 Participation and Democracy Nico Carpentier Part I: Participations 14 Introduction to Participations 17 Nico Carpentier Community Media as Rhizome 19 Nico Carpentier The Art of Community Media Organisations 29 Nico Carpentier Shaking the Airwaves: Participatory Radio Practices 34 Helen Hahmann Life:Moving 42 Briony Campbell and the Life:Moving participants and project team Life:Moving - The Six Participants 47 Briony Campbell and the Life:Moving participants and project team Interview with Michele Aaron 53 Meet Y/Our Wall 56 Old Nicosia Revealed Interview with Natalie Hami (Old Nicosia Revealed) 63 Community Art - A Neo-liberal Solution for the Deconstruction of 67 Welfare State? Pascal Gielen ix Poetry Route River Flows 82 Wilfred Apiung Akan, Leonoor Akkermans, Eleanor Anabire, Loes ten Anscher, Kate Opoku Boateng, Jacomien den Boer, Mary Chulu, Desta Dekebo, Aliyi Abdulah Deressa, Assefa Addis Habtamu, Nayel Sayed Hasibullah, Mohamed Jalloh, Juliana Alphonce Kabaitilaki, Lufumu Fikiri katiko, Jonas Samuel Laryea, Susan Kosgei Lebuluz, Elizabeth Mutumi Mailu, Alick Sylvester Mbewe, Adélphine Muhirwa, Emerence Mukangabo, Mwale Ernest Mupemo, Kojo Tawiah Baah Nuakoh, Jeroen Rijke, Ali Makame Said, Brinah Mandisa Senzere, Samuel Smith, Yewbdar Tadesse, Sulemana Wahab, Loes Witteveen, Simon Satunmia Yambor River Flows – An Artistic Approach Towards Community Resilience, 92 Participation and Social Learning in Natural Resources Management Loes Witteveen and Jacomien den Boer Interview with Loes Witteveen 102 The Party of the Housing Dream 106 Peter Snowdon and the Groupe ALARM Introductions to the Screening of The Party of the Housing Dream 112 Peter Snowdon, Aurélia Van Gucht and Abdo Naji Street Magazines as Communicative Spaces of Inclusion and Solidarity 116 Vaia Doudaki Part II: Reflections about Democracy and the Political 122 Introduction to Reflections about Politics and Democracy 125 Nico Carpentier Revalidating Participation: Power and Pre-Figurative Politics within 126 contemporary Left-wing Movements Bart Cammaerts Artists, Cultural Producers and Activists: Integrations and Articulations of 138 Struggles Nicos Trimikliniotis Mirror Palace of Democracy 146 Nico Carpentier x The Five Ideologies of the Mirror Palace of Democracy 153 Nico Carpentier It’s Good to Know 154 Join2Media Interview with Didem Eroglu and Orestis Tringides (Join2Media) 160 Communities and Memories of Struggles: What is Left of the Occupy the 165 Buffer Zone (OBZ) Movement? Nicos Trimikliniotis Motivwv1.1 172 George Kyrou Interview with George Kyrou 178 Eclipse 182 Emilia Izquierdo Interview with Emilia Izquierdo 188 Speaking the Unspoken: Challenging Hegemonic Discourses 192 Hazal Yolga Part III: Interactions 196 Introduction to Interactions 199 Nico Carpentier wolFMoon howling 200 Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman It’s in My Nature 206 Brane Zorman wolFMoon howling: Live Performance Instructions / Guidelines 212 Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman Interview with Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman (CONA Institute) 213 xi What Is It About?! 216 Elena Volina and Mathieu Devavry Interview with Elena Volina 221 Social Sculpture Performance/Workshop Unfolding-Unwrapped 224 Johannes Gerard Interview with Johannes Gerard 230 All Sources Are Broken 234 Labor Neunzehn Interview with Alessandro Massobrio and Valentina Besegher 240 (Labor Neunzehn) Open Mic – A Community Radio Experiment 244 MYCYradio Interview with Hazal Yolga and Orestis Tringides (MYCYradio) 250 Community Spectradio 254 Yiannis Christidis, Markos Souropetsis and Co Interview with Yiannis Christidis 259 Part IV: Reflections about Identity, Community, 262 Technology and Nature Introduction to Reflections about Identity, Community, Technology 265 and Nature Nico Carpentier Just a Short Article About the net.art That Was a Community 266 Vuk Ćosić Open Community - Open Networks 272 Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud About Open Community – Open Networks 275 Helene Black and Yiannis Colakides xii “...” An Archeology of Silence in the Digital Age – An Artist Talk 286 Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud Tools for the Next Revolution workshop 290 Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud You Belong Here 294 Liza Philosof Interview with Liza Philosof 300 Fugue 302 Nance Davies Interview with Nance Davies 308 Architecture of a Spectral City 312 Will Kendrick Interview with Will Kendrick 318 Conclusion 320 Respublika! is Political. Why Participatory Art and Art on Participation 322 Matters. A Political Analysis Olga Yegorova Appendices 338 Festival Programme 340 Respublika! Seminars 342 Biographies 348 xiii xiv Foreword On behalf of NeMe, we would like to express our gratitude to the curator and initiator of Respublika!, Dr Nico Carpentier. His passion for Cyprus and his extensive research and experience on Cypriot community media has been a tremendous and substantial contribution to strengthening the visibility, importance, and outreach of citizen participation via collaboration, creative innovation and promoting democratic principles through the engagement of small-scale community media organisations. This far-reaching project commenced as, Respublika!: A Cypriot Community Media Arts Festival and by the time all the content was collated for this publication, the title evolved into Respublika!: Experiments in the Performance of Participation and Democracy, a more precise representation of the vast experimental nature of the project which resulted in the documentation of a myriad of diverse voices and creative outcomes on the subject of community media both in Cyprus and internationally. Community participatory practices, within the context of Respublika! focused on issues regarding the implementation of the right of citizens to participate or collaborate in order to creatively contribute and transform the framework of localism. As such, enhancing cultural value and shared experience was inherent in its practical implementation. This multi-faceted project succeeded in accessing the community’s alternative and often peripheral interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary cultural practices and to critically articulate these relationships in context to media, democracy and participation. In addition to the extensive representation of individuals from the public domain who responded to the Respublika! Open Call, we invited the Berlin based artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud for a series of events which included an exhibition entitled Open Community - Open Networks, Artists talk, workshop, and meetings with Cypriot hacker groups and academics. Wachter and Jud’s history of involvement in effective social action through collaborative and community-based projects made a substantial and very significant contribution to Respublika! which immediately resonated with the Cypriot audience. The initiatives of Respublika! furthered the social role of creative practice by promoting community empowerment through the engagement with the public. It did this by introducing new methods and methodologies for us to rethink and re-evaluate our approaches to collaboration by effectively blurring the boundaries between the public, the audience, and creative producers. We hope that the readers of this publication may visually experience and fathom the immense outreach of the project and hopefully continue its journey of promoting citizen participation in the process of social change. Helene Black and Yiannis Colakides xv 2 An Introduction to Respublika! Experiments in the Performance of Participation and Democracy Nico Carpentier The Rationale of Democratisation Respublika! has contributed to the discussions and reflections about participation and democracy, and how they are performed in contemporary Western societies. Respublika!’s engagement has not been neutral, because it was driven by the idea of the necessity of deepening the democratic revolution, labelled by Chantal Mouffe (1988), or to democratise democracy, to use the words of Anthony Giddens (1994). It was also driven by the need to protect democracy from the incessant attempts to reduce its span and undermine its strength. In order to better understand this position, it is important to realise that democracy is always incomplete and unfinished, which implies that it can be improved, but also that it needs to be protected, as it is always under threat. Respublika!’s imaginary of intensifying democracy is intimately connected to the decentralisation and equalisation of power