FELLOWS

Katerina Protonotariou

2018/19 Athens

Katerina was born and lives in Athens. With an educational background in Civil Engineering (University of Patras), Acting (“Delos” Drama School, Athens) and Urban & Regional Planning (NTUA), Katerina explores collaborative arts and the city. Being a “doing many different things” enthusiast, she is a happy member of UrbanDig project (since 2016) where she approaches the field in various ways: artistic and scientific research, creative structures’ design, organizational processes, attempts for fruitful interaction and performing in public space( along with cute uninvited cats).

Strongly guided by the idea that arts should first of all serve society, Katerina sees programs like START (she is a 2018 Fellow) as an opportunity for improvement and learning new methods and perspectives in the sociocultural field. Trying to build a direct relationship between arts and people is not always easy, but definitely worth pursuing! So, for Katerina, her valuable START experience is fuel for further work on creative ways that connect us and that help us re-invent our everyday life in the city together.

Project Title

Beating Limbo

Co-creating frameworks of co-existence between migrants and natives through a game for collective problem-solving.

Athens is a city experiencing the overwhelming effects of both a financial and a refugee ‘crisis’: Thousands of refugees are stranded here, without being able to perform any meaningful life activity. At the same time, thousands of Greeks undertake flexible or uninsured employment, remaining unable to imagine an even short-term life plan. The EU funds for the management of the refugee flows resulted in the temporary employment of numerous young skilled native people in Athens – bringing these two populations together
in NGOs, community centers &municipality organizations. Into this context, the kind of relationship that seems to be established - between young natives and migrants – tends to look like “The active helper & the passive receiver”.

Considering the aforementioned, working towards meaningful co-existence seems to be an ultimate priority. First step to achieve this? By developing mechanisms for cultivating equal relationships through commonalities. Migrants and young natives depart from very different backgrounds, but they have one very
crucial thing in common: they both experience their time in the city in a precarious and highly insecure way – while, the share a common daily life with several practical problems. The idea is to use game as a means and invite these two groups combine their efforts on this common basis, towards meaningful cultural dialogue & the creation of new possible relationships.

Host Institution

interaction Leipzig e.V.

interaction Leipzig e.V. has been funded in 2015 in order to create encounters between people with and without refugee background. It does so by organizing a diverse variety of cultural events, which we call ‘interactions’: For example, photo workshops, a programming course, cooking events, monthly museum visits, intercultural picnics and much more. We also have an active multilingual choir and a theatre group as well as a monthly musical jam session.