Room to Bloom Residency in Athens for emerging, feminist artists from Ukraine
We want to enable some female artists who had to flee Ukraine to live in the house of Avtonomi Akadimia in Athens this summer. For this, we need financial support!
If you can help, we are utterly happy for donations to this paypal account: [email protected]
The funds will be used to finance the rent of the house (that has a beautiful garden), traveling costs and per diem for 8 participants of the residency. We applied for EU funds, too, but in order to start immediately with the first participants, we need private funds.
The first five artists from Ukraine will stay in the residency until the end of July. We are happy to welcome Maria Mayor, Yustyna Kravchuk, Anna Ivchenko, Olga Papash, Alina Nealina and Nastia Teor. About 1500 Euro per month is needed to make the residency available, but any donation is welcome. The residency is organized on a volunteering basis by Joulia Strauss (Avtonomi Akadimia) and Florine Schüschke, who has taken part in the Room to Bloom program of 2021.
About 1500 Euro per month is needed to make the residency available, but any donation is welcome. We organize the residency on a volunteering basis.
Why the residency?
A member of our Room to Bloom network reports from Kyiv “every minute that I waited for those missiles to hit somewhere lasted an hour, everything was slow down. It’s kind of a time trap that I have experienced many times since that first attack. On this day I lost senses of peace, safety and home.”
The reports from Ukraine, as unbearable as they are, show the need for safer spaces for individuals fleeing their homes and having experienced the consequences of attacks in their home cities. The residency for Ukrainian artists in our house in Athens is meant to offer such a place.
The residency is to provide a refuge, a place to be in safety, peace and a different surrounding for a month for Ukrainian feminist artists, to give rest for a while, and to provide a surrounding to find their artistic voice again. The residency is meant to be a grant without the obligation of producing a piece, but for open development projects. It is to pursue the artists’ own development and a new start of their artistic expression.
Organization of the residency
The organization of the residency will be done mainly by Avtonomi Akadimia and associated feminist (refugee) artists based in Athens on a volunteering basis.
Avtonomi Akadimia is the Athenian Partner Organization of Room to Bloom, founded and run by the artist and activist Joulia Strauss in 2015. The garden of the house where the residency takes place is used by the Akadimia to hold its public seminars over the summer months.
We invite the participants of the residency to take part in the program of the Akadimia. The program will be shaped of political and therapeutical feminist knowledge. Moreover, we can give the participants of the residency a point of departure into the Athenian cultural scene.
The residency will be held inside our small house with a garden in central Athens for six months, from Mai until October 2022. The house holds four rooms for four artists at a time, meaning appr. 8 artists will be able to live and work there for two to three months each. The residency will be offered free of charge for the participants, and they will be supported with travel costs and per diem.