FFF3 | And For The Rest (Athens)

“What would you change in the world, in your life, in yourself, in the country, the city, your neighbourhood, or just about the view from your window? And what’s needed to bring about these changes?"

From children of all ages to asylum seekers, migrants and refugees participants in the project were asked about their wishes, needs, demands and hopes for the future, focused on what they would like to change. All this by virtue of “And for the rest”, the poster-project from Tim Etchells, the ingenious and award-winning director and founder of the UK’s longest-lived experimental theatre company, Forced Entertainment –or, put another way, from the man who erected a giant neon sign on the banks of the Thames a few years ago to announce “We wanted to be the sky”.

Taking short texts from the interviews (conducted by Etchells’ associates in Athens –the director and dramatist Georgia Mavragani and the educator and translator Phaedra Tsalababouni), Etchells creates interventions in the city trying to give an insight into the wishes of people usually held outside the public discussion.

Director's note

"Approaching the interviews done in Athens for this project I was gripped by the energy, optimism and desire for change the participants expressed with such clarity. At same time I was drawn in by the directness of their wishes, and the immediacy and depth of the problems and questions they faced. In selecting fragments for the posters I've tried to choose a range of ideas that articulate these problems, questions and desires, and which, more broadly, float powerful ideas, images and micro-stories into public space. I'm interested in the question of how we are, and how we can be, together in a city like Athens, at this particular time, gripped as it is by the experiences of austerity and the ongoing influx of refugees and as it continues in the political no-mans land of life in the shadow of the Troika. What comes out of these posters I hope is a set of propositions and dreams, confrontational shards and echoes, mini-poems that speak into the street in a dynamic and questioning way."
–Tim Etchells