Participants

Symposium New Old Properties
5 - 6 May 2022
Goethe-Institut Athen

 

Andreas Angelidakis

Andreas Angelidakis (born in 1968) lives and works in Athens. Trained as an architect (Sci-ARC bArch, Columbia MSAAD), Angelidakis maintains a practice centered on research and exhibition often examined through the lens of the internet. Angelidakis has consistently challenged the end-product of architectural practice by reversing the representation-to-realization sequence of the production of buildings. He often starts with an existing building, producing models, films, ruins, installations or alternative histories, blurring fact and fiction, smoothing out the borders between the real and the virtual. Recent exhibitions include The State of the Art of Architecture 1st Chicago Architecture Biennial, 12th Baltic Triennial at CAC Vilnius 2015, Supersuperstudio, PAC Milano 2015, documenta14 Athens and Kassel.
 
 

Omar Degan

Omar Degan is an Architect, Principal and founder of DO Architecture Group, an architecture office specialized in Emergency contexts, Post-conflict reconstruction and cultural diversity. The principle of his firm, which is based between East Africa-USA and Italy, lies in designing culturally, historically and climatically relevant solutions to social problems around the world, with a particular focus on the most vulnerable communities and minorities. With his work, he seeks to develop new ways to celebrate the cultural identity of the communities around the world through the use of architecture, supporting peace, development and a more sustainable future.
 
 

Radha D'Souza

Radha D’Souza is a Professor of International Law, Development and Conflict Studies at the University of Westminster (UK). Before she taught law at University of Waikato in New Zealand, and development studies, sociology and human geography at the University of Auckland. She practiced law in the High Court of Mumbai in the areas of labour rights, constitutional and administrative law, public interest litigation and human rights. D’Souza works as a writer, critic and commentator. She is a social justice activist and worked with labour movements and democratic rights movements in her home country of India as an organizer and activist lawyer. She is the author of What’s Wrong with Rights? (2018) and Interstate Disputes Over Krishna Waters (2006). Together with Dutch artist Jonas Staal she is co-producer of the art project "Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes".
 
 

Frank Engster

Frank Engster wrote his PhD thesis on the subject of time, money and measure. After, he was a Fellow at the Post-Wachstums Kolleg in Jena, Germany. His areas of interest lie in the different – (post-)operaist, (post-)structuralist, form-analytic, (queer-)feminist etc. – readings of Marx’s critique of the political economy and especially in money as a technique and its connection with measurement, quantification, time and (natural) science (some publications are available on academia.edu).
 
 

Marina Fokidis

Marina Fokidis is a curator, writer, lecturer and institution-maker based in Athens Greece. In 2010, amidst the Greek economic crisis, she founded the independent space Kunsthalle Athena to reflect on the social role of art institutions in the 21st century, while in 2012, she founded South as a State of Mind magazine, a biannual arts and culture journal. In 2014, she was invited to become part of the core team for documenta 14 by artistic director Adam Szymczyk. She is currently curator at large of the public program for Salzburg International Summer Academy for Fine Arts while in 2020 she was the curator for Vanderbilt University’s EADJ (Engine of Art Democracy and Justice) year-long program Living in Common in the Precarious Souths, for which she received a curatorial award of excellence by the Association of Art Museum Curators (US).
 
 

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is assistant professor of politics and anthropology at the American University of Beirut, founder, and navigator of the Floating Laboratory of Action and Theory At Sea and co-founder of Decolonize Hellas. He researches, teaches, and writes on political violence, global governance, and the oceans.
 
 

Susanne Leeb

Susanne Leeb is an art historian and teaches at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She studied Art History, Philosophy and New German Literature in Cologne and was awarded her PhD in Frankfurt/Oder on the thesis "The Art of Others. World Art and Anthropological Modernism". Her research focuses on transcultural art history and contemporary art. She co-curated the March 2020 issue of Texte zur Kunst, on the topic "Property/Eigentum".
 
 

Hendrik Lehmann

Hendrik Lehmann is Head of the Tagesspiegel Innovation Lab, an interdisciplinary team of developers, designers and editors that focuses on data driven investigations, visual storytelling and interactive journalistic applications. Their work has been awarded numerous times. Lehmann has coordinated multiple collaborative investigations together with international media outlets, startups, NGOs and universities. In the projects „Wem gehört Berlin?“ and „Cities for Rent“ his team and their partners extensively researched property ownership in Berlin and other European capitals. He studied Political Science at Free University Berlin as well as Urban and Digital Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
 
 

Kalas Liebfried

Kalas Liebfried (*1989 in Svishtov, Bulgaria) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Munich, Germany. He studied sculpture and time-based media at the AdBK Munich and Philosophy at the LMU Munich. Central to his installations and performances is the exploration of the sculptural and socio-political potentials of sound. Since the beginning of his artistic practice, Liebfried has used found footage material as the basis for his compositions and video works, raising questions of reproducibility, appropriation and intertextuality. His works have been shown among others at Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris), National Gallery (Sofia), Lenbachhaus (Munich) and Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich). Liebfried is founder of PARA (non-label organisation for sound).
 
 

Ibrahim Mahama

Ibrahim Mahama (b. Tamale, Ghana 1987, lives and works between Accra and Tamale). He graduated in 2013 at Kwame Nkurumah University in Kumasi. During his university years, he began a series of interventions that reflect on the theme of globalisation, work and the circulation of goods, with works that were also created thanks to a series of collaborations with Ghanaian citizens. In 2019 he opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), followed by the opening of a vast studio complex, Red Clay, in nearby Janna Kpeŋŋ in September 2020. In April 2021, Mahama opened a renovated silo, Nkrumah Volini, in Tamale.
 
 

Vassilis Noulas

Vassilis Noulas is a theatre director and a visual artist based in Athens. He is a founding member of the theatre collective Nova Melancholía. His work has been presented at the Athens Festival, the Onassis Stegi, the Greek National Opera, the Athens Biennale, the Santarcangelo Festival, as well as in squats, apartments, and self-managed spaces. He is the author of five books of poetry and small prose. “The Lair”, first feature film, premiered at the Thessaloniki Festival 2019. He has been collaborating since 2014 with Kostas Tzimoulis on their joint visual project VASKOS. In the recent years he has taken part in several bottom-up city movements: Mavili Collective, Theatre Embros Occupancy, Green Park Occupancy.
 
 

Stefanie Peter

Stefanie Peter is Head of Cultural Programmes South East Europe at Goethe-Institut Athen. She studied Cultural Anthropology and African Studies in Hamburg and Cracow and was awarded her PhD in Frankfurt/Oder. She has written for newspapers and magazines. Since 2007 she has worked for the Goethe-Institut in Warsaw, Novosibirsk and Munich.
 
 

Gabriel Schimmeroth

Gabriel Schimmeroth is a curator, historian and head of public programming at the Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK). He is responsible for the experimental project space Zwischenraum – A Space Between and the project MARKK in Motion, which is part of the Initiative of Ethnological Collections of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. His research interests range from urban history and the history of transnational infrastructure projects to material culture and the future of ethnographic museums. Together with Martha Kazungu, he is curating MARKK’s contribution Archive of Experiences – with Kelvin Haizel to the Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2022.
 
 

Andreas Siekmann

Andreas Siekmann's work focuses on issues relating to the economisation of public space. He works with various media, including drawing, painting, film, objects and carrying out interventions in public space. His work has been featured at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), documenta 11 (2002), documenta 12 (2007), and the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of South America (2017). He has been involved in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including The Potosí Principle (2010/11, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid & Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz), Heads (2021, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin), and Potosí Principle – Archive (2021, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin). Andreas Siekmann lives and works in Berlin.
 
 

Jenny Stupka

Jenny Stupka is an activist and spokesperson with the campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen that promotes the socialization of big housing companies in Berlin. After four years of continuous work the initiative won a referendum in September 2021 when 59% of Berlin voters voted in favour of expropriation and socialization of said companies. The aim of the campaign is to bring more than 240.000 flats under democratic control and into new forms of community economy. Stupka is a social and political theorist working on critical perspectives on private property. She was born in Berlin.
 
 

Constantina Theodorou

Constantina Theodorou is an architect, urban researcher and PhD candidate of Urbanism NTUA, exploring emerging assemblages of geology-infrastructure-politics in the context of planetary urbanization and climate change. In parallel, she is engaged with performative practices – walking lectures, video-performances, empty spaces reactivation – in urban space. She is a founding member of CoHab Athens introducing cooperative housing models in Greece and Counterpublics for artistic practices in extended public space.
 
 

Kathrin Wildner

Dr. Kathrin Wildner is an urban anthropologist and did ethnographic fieldwork in New York City, Mexico City, Istanbul, Bogotá and other urban agglomerations. As an urban researcher she teaches, publishes and participates in transdisciplinary projects and international exhibitions. She is a founding member of metroZones – Center for Urban Affairs. Between 2012 and 2021 she was Professor for Urban Anthropology, Cultural Theory and Practice at the HafenCity University, Hamburg and Visiting Professor at the Master Program Spatial Strategies at the Art Academy Weißensee, Berlin (2013-2015).