From (Not-)Doing-It-Yourself to Doing-It-(Cheaper)-With-Others: The rise of a Workshop Culture in the Greek Economic Dystopia

Abstract

The so-called “Greek debt crisis” has led a whole generation of emergent and mid-career artists to seek plausible ways to finance themselves and their artistic projects. The same time, all sorts of project spaces, laboratories, workshops, participatory art projects and relevant activities started to appear across Greece’s capital, mainly, as well as in various other cities. For their greatest part, such workshops would zero in open-source software and/or hardware technologies as well as in various aspects of contemporary digital art/culture and urbanism. More, they would advertise themselves as addressing creative individuals of all sorts of backgrounds and disciplines and they would be organised/hosted by a wide range of dedicated or semi-dedicated venues, festivals and institutions, such as for example Frown Tails, Space Under, Athens Digital Arts Festival, the Onassis Cultural Foundation and others. In due course, and following broader international trends, a broader— still topical—‘Workshop Culture’ has been advanced and eventually standardised. In those years of severe finan- cial recession, Greek audiences had been given the chance to engage with all sorts of local or international artists in order to implement a diverse range of art pro- jects, this way suggesting a rather participatory approach to art making. Such a workshop culture ac- counted for a shift towards a culturally dispersed and multi-disciplinary Do-It-With-Others approach. More importantly, a viable solution to a very difficult economic condition has been reached, so that prospective artists and art-enthusiasts could be guaranteed relatively cheap access to specialised education and so that professional and semi-professional artists could acquire the necessary resources to realise projects. Workshops turned out to be one of the most important means of artistic production in the Greek economic dystopia. This paper is a first attempt to account for the Greek D.I.W.O. movement, and to examine its signification for the Greek artistic landscape. Eventually, it is shown that such a D.I.W.O.- driven economical model does not necessarily qualify as an ‘alternative’ one but, rather, as a contingency of the dominant commerce-based model of our times.