ULYSSES | Seawards Workshop

The new European project “ULYSSES: European Odyssey” is inspired by the status of James Joyce’s novel as one of the seminal landmarks in European culture and will unfold in each of the 18 cities in the chronological order of the novel’s 18 episodes. This journey starts in Athens with a workshop focusing on imaginable mythologies and urban geographies, a collaboration between Onassis Stegi and the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum.

In this workshop the invited artists, activists, and academics will share how their working practices encounter, interact with, and challenge narratives in their geographical space of activity. This centers on Athens, but the workshop will also reflect on the relations between this city and other cities—how multiple cities exist in one space; how we make and remake urban space (as Joyce does) through memory and creativity.

The conveners will facilitate collective exercises to establish relational communication by bringing questions of narratives of the city, of how urban space is being produced and reproduced on the level of the imaginary, and how different places and identities converge in each of the participants’ work and practice.