The Department of Civil Imagination (DCI) Agency in Athens

RESHAPE is an experimental, bottom-up research process that proposes instruments for transition towards a fairer arts ecosystem across Europe and the Southern Mediterranean. Forty art workers engaged in collaborative work relating to five major challenges of today’s arts sector: Art and Citizenship, Fair Governance Models, Value of Art in Social Fabric, Solidarity Economies and Transnational/Postnational Artistic Practices. Together they have created a series of Prototypes that reflect and incite the transformation of the art sector towards practices that are more in line with the civil role of the arts.

Paky Vlassopoulou, one of the founding members of 3 137, was a participant of the RESHAPE trajectory Art and Citizenship that created The Department of Civil Imagination (DCI), a fictional department that utilises the ‘civil imagination’ as a radical act to reshape realities in poetic, practical, and political ways following the provocation by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha that ‘all organizing is science fiction.’

In parallel, over the past few years, 3 137 has been developing a similar methodological tool, through the invention of the immaterial art institution GABRIELA. GABRIELA is a self-reflexive process that functions as a tool, a service, and a manual for questioning the role of―and the labor involved in―artists' initiatives. The organizational structure of GABRIELA appropriates corporate strategies such as directorship, administration, branding, and communication campaigns to occupy public space and the web, seeking to redistribute itself among its peers.

On the occasion of this meeting between these two fictional entities (DCI & GABRIELA) we present a conversation, in the format of short recorded one-to-one interviews, with the aim to rethink and reimagine on a local level a different arts ecosystem. 

The participants were invited to share ideas about the relationship between the private and public sector in cultural production, about the values that can be used to build a code of conduct for workers in the cultural sector and about the value of art in the social fabric. 

The collection of recorded interviews is a study that enables us to understand the particular conditions within which the sector operates in Greece, to hear different perspectives in order to map the common ground that might exist for the improvement of the working conditions and the cultural production overall as well as for the development of critical discourse in Greece. The opinions that are presented here are strictly personal. The questions that were posed were the outcome of the conversations between 3 137 and Οnassis AiR. The recorded interviews were conducted by Kosmas Nikolaou.

Furthermore, in collaboration with Onassis AiR, 3 173 organized two open days for the presentation of the research and the public launch of the research materials that were produced within the scope of RESHAPE in relation to the art sector in Greece, including the "RESHAPE: A Workbook to Reimagine the Art World", the final publication that brings together the research, as well as the printed materials that were the outcome of the program on a local and on a European level.

Participants: Christos Carras, Marily Konstantinopoulou & Dimitra Nikolou, Dimitris Passas, Artemis Stamatiadi, Katerina Tselou, Evita Tsokanta, and Venia Vergou.

The Art and Citizenship working group consisted of Ana Alexieva, Joon Lynn Goh, Jessica Huber, Peter Jenkinson, Virág Major, Chiara Organtini, An Vandermeulen, Maria Vlachou, Paky Vlassopoulou, and Shelagh Wright.

The recordings took place in September 2021 at the Οnassis AiR space in Αthens.