AKTES 2023 | Tilos Island

For its third edition, AKTES program will travel to Tilos to explore the history of the island from the ancient times till today together with its children. Using artistic experimentation as a tool the program will develop through two ten-day workshops facilitated by Οnassis AiR Fellows Margarita Athanasiou and Lito Skopeliti.

Kick-starting this year's program, in March 2023 Lito Skopeliti will co-curate a cultural route in order to narrate different aspects of the island's history and complex identity. The high-school students will become researchers and storytellers by exploring the various dimensions of the social, political and cultural life of the island from the ancient times until today. Some of the driving questions of this journey will be: What is history? What histories do we choose to tell and why? This route, that will be co-designed by the children and the artist, will weave together geological as well as historical elements, oral histories and myths as well as historical facts. During the workshop and through the use of (auto)ethnographic tools, historical research and observation, the students will create a timeline of the history of the island that will be presented at the end of the cultural route.

The program will continue and conclude over a second workshop facilitated by Margarita Athanasiou that will take place in April and May 2023. The aim of this workshop is to visually present the multiplicity of historical narratives of the island in the form of a specially designed artist zine. How can we illustrate history? The high-school students will experiment with the technique of collage that allows us to extract an image from its original context and insert it into a new one. Through collage, the history and geography of the island will come closer to the personal experiences of its inhabitants and their ideas for the future. The participants will work with archival materials that will collect during the first workshop and will create their own personal records through the use of photography, writing and drawing. The outcome will take the form of an imaginary map of Tilos, co-designed by the participants and the artist, that instead of depicting an objective reality -as normal maps do- will represent a potential timespace where what happened -minor and major events- takes place at the same time with everything that will happen. This map of collective stories will take the form of an artist zine.

AKTES in Tilos is implemented by COMM’ON with the donation of the Athina I. Martinou Foundation.

The artistic curation and hospitality of the artists is supported by Οnassis AiR.

AKTES is under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and is implemented in collaboration with the Municipality of Tilos and with the support of Blue Star Ferries.