How many cities and how many stories fit in the same city? As many as the people living in it!

The project Eye am Thessaloniki is a creative proposal for an alternative city mapping based on the various perspectives of individuals and specific social groups that coexist in the urban web.

Our initiative begins by focusing on homelessness and by examining this recurring social phenomenon in the past and present of the city. Having as a starting point the centennial (1917 -2017) of the great fire of Thessaloniki that left behind thousands of homeless people in Thessaloniki, we end up with the present financial crisis by highlighting the various factors that can lead to the loss of “home”.

By combining the map of the city with personal narratives, we attempt to draw attention to a current social phenomenon by incorporating it in the city’s history. As in present times, we are all potentially homeless, we present people who experience a different city and we invite the citizens to walk in their shoes, to drift in the city with them, to see Thessaloniki through their eyes and listen to a different city story, a story they might not be familiar with or even ignore.

“Connecting Grünau” was conducted in collaboration with the socio-cultural center die VILLA to reveal the human side of a misunder- stood district of the city of Leipzig. Grünau passed into collective memory as one of East Germany’s largest prefab housing estates, and is now in decline.

I invited local inhabitants to participate in the creation of a collective art-installation based on their own memories and everyday routes, with the intention of enabling them to see Grünau in a different way. In cooperation with the local so- cio-cultural center KOMM-Haus, who were organ- izing a handcrafts-exhibition, I asked visitors to show me their Grünau by depicting their personal routes and important places using multicolored threads and pins on a large-scale map.

During the process, and following the main theme of the exhibition, an imaginary Grünau tree began to form itself; branches were made out of personal connections and the map transformed into a collective handmade artwork.