It has been a strange year for us all. The pandemic has been a major change in the way we live our lives and something we all are faced with.

With the retreat season postponed until such a time when it makes sense to restart, the team at Nefeli Nine Retreat has put together a FREE program of events for you, and your friends and family. The sign-up process is a very simple.

In these unprecedented times, Technopolis, a major cultural venue of the City of Athens, becomes accessible online in Greek, providing fun online activities that everyone is welcome to participate in! 

Explore the old Athens gasworks through a fascinating virtual tour, discover the digital archive of the Industrial Gas Museum, learn more about the historical exhibition 160 years made in Greece, and watch highlights of your favorite concerts - all from the comfort of your own home!




Tour of the Industrial Gas Museum: The gasworks, which provided the city of Athens with energy and lighting for 130 years, a unique historical site of great industrial heritage invites us to discover it through this online tour. You are promised a fascinating time travel experience as you follow the gas production line, admire the mechanical equipment and learn about the workers’ role in the old plant.

VR Tour of 160 years made in Greece: A trip to 160 years of Greek Industry: from the very beginning, the glorious moments and the hidden aspects to de-industrialization, its present and most importantly its future. 3 decisions, 8 sectors of the Greek industry, 120 industries, and more than 800 items. The Industrial Gas Museum provides us with the opportunity to gain insight into Greece's industrial history, read original historical texts, study rare documents and photographs, as well as interact with the exhibits!

Digital Collection of the Museum: Explore the rich collection of the Industrial Gas Museum which includes a significant number of relevant to gas production devices, tools, machinery, and equipment (gas meters, cookers, water heaters, lights, etc.), as well as factory items and a plethora of audiovisual material.

 

Sundays At Technopolis return for the 7th consecutive year, offering children (aged 4 to 11) and their families the chance to take part in a wide range of free activities, which, this time, are made available online! 

Since 2013, more than 15,000 children have taken part in the educational programs and activities held under Sundays At Technopolis, including scientific workshops, theatrical performances, music and movement courses, interactive tours and programs recommended by the Industrial Gas Museum. Most activities will be available in Greek only, however, some of them will also be available in English and Czech. 

Sunday, April 12,  is dedicated to the city of Athens for two important reasons: The Industrial Gas Museum wishes to celebrate the International Day For Monuments and Sites, but also to commemorate the innovative educational program entitled The Kids, the City and the Monuments, an initiative of the City of Athens which this year celebrates its 4th anniversary. The purpose of the program has been to promote the development of skills in children, by providing children and educators with multifaceted stimuli and training systems, concentrating on Athens's architectural legacy. 

More particularly, The International Day for Monuments and Sites, also known as World Heritage Day, is an international observance held on April 18  each year around the world, with different types of activities, including visits to monuments and heritage sites, conferences, round tables, and newspaper articles. It aims to bring global attention to the need to conserve monuments and sites and to celebrate the diversity of our cultural heritage. 

Through incredible online activities, parents and children can discover the city of Athens in the most enjoyable way, as well as its landmarks and neighborhoods, and of course, they will learn more about Technopolis - today housed in the old Gasworks in Athens and a major monument of industrial heritage. The activities will become available online on Sunday, April 12 at 11:00. 

 

Color Athens (Ages 4+):  Have you ever thought of exploring Athens through coloring? Visit Acropolis, walk through the historic centre, discover the National Garden and give them life by using colors and your imagination! 

The City Through Your Window (Ages 6+): What's the view out your window? How does your neighborhood look like? You can either take a picture or get creative and begin drawing everything you see when you look outside. 

Bauhaus in house (Ages 8+): Do you know anything about the Bauhaus movement? Has the Bauhaus architecture survived in Athens? Get acquainted with one of the most important design movements in history and draw an imaginary city where the basic principles of Bauhaus apply. 

A City In The Dark (Ages 6+): Do you like mysteries? This award-winning theatrical play follows a detective as he tries to solve a puzzling mystery. Why deep darkness has covered the city? Can you handle the truth? 

Virtual Tour of the Museum (Ages 9+): Explore the Industrial Gas Museum of Athens and learn more about the factory that provided energy and lighting to the capital for about 130 years.  Follow the production line of the lighting gas, admire the old machinery, discover the role of entrepreneurs and that of factory workers, learn about the working conditions and become familiar with concepts such as industrial heritage and archaeology.

Other Suggested Activities

Video Games: Through two fascinating video games follow the gas production line, from coal loading to gas measurement, and its technological advances, get in touch with the old machinery and admire the historical treasures of the gas world.

Creative Games: Once you've virtually explored the museum it's time to test your knowledge. The museum offers a series of educational and creative games such as crosswords and puzzles that will help you remember everything you learned. 

DIY Art Lab: Using simple supplies, nurture your creative spirits with these fun crafts and let your vivid imagination show you how the old Athens gasworks once looked like!

Andy Warhol on your doorstep: Get acquainted with the visual art movement known as Pop Art, its leading figure Andy Warhol and its Factory, through incredible art games! 

The Cuban-Greek musical partnership Santa Palabra, known for their vibrant live performances around Athens and their Latin rhythms, have composed a song Son Pa Atenas dedicated to the ancient city of Athens - described as 'the immortal and eternal Greek capital.'

Son Pa Atenas is an irresistible mix of authentic Latin melodies and meaningful lyrics, giving insight into Greece's rich history and at the same time getting everyone dancing! The music video shows the artists singing and dancing against the backdrop of Athens' most iconic landmarks, such as the Parthenon and the Hellenic Parliament, reminding us how beautiful the city is.
 

Fun and unbeat this song will surely make your heart beat to the rhythm! 

While the coronavirus pandemic has brought anxiety and uncertainty to the world, a beautiful sight is on its way to remind us how a natural phenomenon can carry extraordinary beauty.

The April full moon is often referred to as Pink Moon because of the pink spring flowers that appear at around the same time of year.

The 3rd and brightest supermoon of the year is about to make its appearance in the Greek sky. At 21:08 (EEST) tonight Tuesday, April 7, the moon will reach its closest point for 2020 at a distance of 356.907 kilometers, at the perigee of its orbit making it appear 30% brighter and 14% larger. The full moon will occur at 05:35 (EEST) on Thursday, April 9.

In a time of isolation and social distancing, this stunning natural phenomenon can be observed from our balconies, terraces, rooftops, and gardens. Don't miss the change to witness the awe-inspiring Pink Moon tonight!

7-year-old Greek pianist, Stelios Kerasidis, has composed a musical piece named “Isolation Waltz,” inspired by the coronavirus pandemic. Stelios dedicated his musical piece to everyone suffering from the coronavirus and people who are isolated at home because of the lockdowns.

 

The tiny pianist started performing in public at the age of five and performed at Carnegie Hall at the age of six. Following his great performances, Stelios began to compose his own music.

 

In October 2018, Stelios won first prize at the Golden Classical Music Awards Invited Winners List after a brilliant performance at New York City’s Weill Recital Hall. Playing a Chopin waltz for his audience and judges, he also became the youngest Greek musician of all time to play at Carnegie Hall.


















To read this article in full,please visit: greekreporter.com

In September 2019 Onassis AiR, the annual Onassis Foundation artistic research & residency program in Athens, opened the doors of an empty building in the center of Athens to house a community of peers from Greece and abroad. Today, after six months of inhabiting this space, filling it with hours of thinking, talking, reading, testing, and making as well as eating together, Onassis AiR has become a home. This house now belongs to more than 30 artists, curators and art practitioners.

Between March 30 and April 24, Onassis AiR 2020/21 Open Call invites artists, designers, activists, curators, collectives, educators who defy the marketable academic establishments, lawyers, performance makers, economists, agitators of institutional models, philosophers, filmmakers and other practitioners who are interested in a communal exploration of two thematic focus areas which the program finds urgent to explore during its second year in existence: identities and ecologies.

Inspired by the title of a novel by Wilson Harris, The Infinite Rehearsal in Four Movements is conceived as a collective research program. Fall 2020: Identities Annihilated (from September until December 2020) will be convened by performance theorist Hypatia Vourloumis and will attend to the ways in which identities cannot be reduced or made transparent. Spring 2021: Everything Equally Evolved (from February until May 2021) will be convened by the writer and artist James Bridle and will explore how the tools we have can at hand be reimagined to bring us down to Earth.

Movement I: 14 September – 25 October 2020
Movement II: 2 November – 13 December 2020


SPRING 2021: EVERYTHING EQUALLY EVOLVED

Movement III: 17 February – 31 March 2021
Movement IV: 7 April – 19 May 2021

The Onassis AiR 2020/21 Open Call is for participants of any age who live & work in Greece or anywhere in the world, but who will commit to being in Athens for the whole duration of the program. Participants should be able to clearly demonstrate an extensive engagement within their practice of one of the two research topics that will be explored in 2020/21, to seek collective exploration and co-existence with their peers without hierarchical structures, and to participate in a non-homogenous collective research environment composed of groups of practitioners coming from diverse disciplines and practices. Each participant will receive an individual research fee of 2,500€ (euros), on top of other resources detailed in the full open call.

ABOUT THE PROGRAMS

FALL 2020: IDENTITIES ANNIHILATED

Convened by: Hypatia Vourloumis

During the Infinite Rehearsals: Movement I & II, participants will seek to attend to the ways in which identities cannot be reduced or made transparent. They will practice a methodological structure of collective study and experimentation, aesthetically and poetically imagined through non-linear associative principles. Crucially, as they will find themselves on the Mediterranean coast, and in a city that is the constructed ancient origin of Western civilization and white supremacy, they will think through the notion of historical identity as a performative, as a method, and not a state of being. In other words, they will engage with questions of doing as opposed to knowing or being, attend to the ongoing legacies of colonial and anti-colonial history rather than ontological claims, refuse linear time, embrace opacity and the movement of freedom, practice disidentification. They will ask: how are we all entangled, in the quantum physics’ sense, in a planetary ‘difference without separability’ as Denise Ferreira da Silva writes? How are we always already “singular-plural” (Jean-Luc Nancy), in the elsewhere and otherwise? How can we destroy the fixed notions and categories of separation inherent to racial capitalism through the aesthetics of a transformative mode of history and time, through the aesthetic imagination and its materializations as a transformative and abolitionist force? How are we always already sharing out the unshareable, invaluable, incalculable?

During Infinite Rehearsal: Movement III & IV participants will collectively explore some of these, and other questions: How can the tools we have at hand be reimagined to bring us down to Earth? How do we reassert the importance of community while building solidarity with the more-than-human world? What would it look like to take the intelligence of animals, plants, and ecosystems as seriously as we take the intelligence of smart machines? What is the relationship between distributed networks and distributed power? How do we practically engage with sensoriums other than our own? And what is vital about doing so here and now, on the edge of the Mediterranean and other, possible futures?

ABOUT THE CONVENERS 

Hypatia Vourloumis is a performance theorist working across anticolonial, feminist, critical race and queer theory; Indonesian and modern Greek cultural production; philosophies of language; theories of aesthetics, music, poetics; sound studies. She received her Ph.D. in performance studies at NYU and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Interweaving Performance Cultures Research Centre at Freie University and the Research Centre for the Humanities in Athens. She is co-editor of Performance Research journal ‘On Institutions’ and has published in journals, art catalogs and edited volumes including Women & Performance, Ephemera, and Theatre Journal. She is co-author with Sandra Ruiz of a book on the aesthetics of resonance (forthcoming with Minor Compositions) and completing a monograph on postcolonial Indonesian paralanguage. She teaches critical theory in the MA Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute.

James Bridle is a writer and artist working across technologies and disciplines. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture, and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, The Atlantic, the New Statesman, The Guardian, and the Observer. “New Dark Age”, their book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018, and they wrote and presented “New Ways of Seeing” for BBC Radio 4 in 2019. Their work received an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2013, an Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival 2014, and an Honorary Mention at CERN COLLIDE 2016, and was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2014. They won the Design Museum Graphics Design of the Year in 2014. They were named as one of the 1000 Most Influential People in London by the Evening Standard in 2007, and one of the 100 Most Influential People in Europe by WIRED Magazine in 2015. They hold a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from University College, London, and wrote the dissertation on creative applications of Artificial Intelligence.

ONASSIS AiR is an initiative of the Onassis Foundation, a cross-pillar collaboration between the Onassis Culture & Onassis Education pillars of the Foundation. Committed to its mission of extending access to health, education, and culture to as many people as possible, the Onassis Foundation supports education with over 7,000 scholarships covering study at the doctoral and postgraduate level in a wide range of fields both in Greece and internationally, investing in curious minds. At the same time, over 1,000 artists who are already releasing their potential enjoy the support of the Onassis Foundation in the form of scholarships. In addition, with over forty Onassis Stegi productions that tour abroad, it presents Greece at its best to the rest of the world. A restless Foundation that takes the support for artists' needs to the next level through Onassis AiR, its new artistic research & (inter)national residency program.

We stay close, not closed. Distance unites us.

We stay at home. But we insist on going out, through the Onassis digital channel. In Athens, New York, Los Angeles, all around the world.  Every week the Onassis Foundation uploads and shares on its YouTube channel instances, images, discussions, sounds, emotions. Sold-out shows, new podcasts, educational programs, virtual cinematic experiences, online courses, secret concerts.

The reality of the Onassis Foundation becomes digital. One Stegi in every house, in a place that doesn’t exist in the map, to entertain, educate, unite, trigger discussions.

We come close, we take the best seat on the couch and tune into the digital channel of the Onassis Foundation. Where you can find something different today and every day with new content made available every Friday, free of charge and with no time limit.

On Stage: With “On Stage,” the Onassis Foundation brings out theatrical and musical shows that were unforgettable, sold out or you didn’t get the chance to attend. Reviewing the past ten years of Stegi and Onassis USA past years’ action, the new digital platform of the Onassis Foundation brings (again) to the stage legendary theatrical and dance performances and concerts.

Onassis Encounters: A meeting with artists, authors, scientists, people who transform the way we think through their works, their lives. Each video is a unique encounter, an opportunity to look at the past but also towards the future, giving a chance to here-and-now culture.

Future in Common: A program created for all the things that concern us, starting from today until as far as tomorrow goes, for what fuels our curiosity and energy, for what we have shared for long and for what we want to share in the future. A place where art meets the environmental crisis and fashions meets thoughts, ideas and a three-dimensional world made of digits.

Onassis Cinema: The curated program “Cinema” consists of selected films by filmmakers who take risks, experiment and redefine the concept of cinema. Hybrid documentaries, short films, powerful stories, including new films that are introduced to the public for the first time, on the virtual premiere in our digital channel.

From April 3, the theatrical performances Little Red Riding Hood – The First Blood, written and directed by Lena Kitsopoulou (2014), Euripides’ Bacchae, directed by Aris Biniaris (2018), the Onassis Youth Festival (2019), as well as RootlessRoot’s dance show Kireru (2012) will be available. from April 10 you will be able to watch a tribute to Efthimis Filippou, including two shows at Stegi based on his texts: Emata (Bloods), directed by Argyro Chioti and the Vasistas Company (2014), and Ρομπ/Rob, directed by Dimitris Karantzas (2018); Antigone in Ferguson, presented at the Onassis USA in New York, with famous American actors accompanied by a choir (2016), and the dance performance Cementary by Patricia Apergi and the Aerites Dance Company (2017).

When it comes to music, you can sway in your living room to the music of Blaine Reininger’s secret concert at the Upper Stage of Stegi (2018), marvel at Tuned City that took place in Ancient Messene (2018), while next week you may be mesmerized by Klangforum Wien and their Happiness Machine (2019) at Stegi and by Lena Kitsopoulou singing Rebetika: The Blues of Greece, at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan (2019).

You can also enjoy discussions with Guerilla Girls (2017), Dimitris Nanopoulos (2016), Paul Giamatti and Vanessa Grigoriadis (2015), and from April 10 with Werner Herzog (2019), the mathematician Christina Karafyllia (2020), or listen to Daniel Mendelsohn’s podcast (2015).

If you opt for education, browse through the lectures of the Cavafy archive, learn about sustainability in fashion and the role of technology for a transparent supply chain, and realize how timeless Elliniki Nomarchia (Hellenic Nomarchy) is by watching professor Eleni Kourmantzi’s lecture.

As we go through an unprecedented crisis, with profound consequences for both our fellow citizens and the economy, it has become more critical than ever to protect public health. The Ministry of Tourism, the Greek National Tourism Organization (GNTO) and all tourism bodies stand by the Greek government in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, advocating that the only responsible choice is to "stay home."

 

Alongside the state's measures to support the travel industry, the Ministry of Tourism, GNTO, and Marketing Greece created the online platform GreeceFromHome, an initiative to enhance the image of our country during the pandemic.

The platform's primary objectives are to help people around the world stay in touch with Greek culture, to discover and be inspired by Greece's beauty, and to enhance their digital skills–all while staying at home.

















The #greecefromhome initiative consists of 3 pillars:

Watch

People are encouraged not just to stay home, but to stay connected to Greek culture through the GNTO Greek Creators channel Visit Greece on YouTube. The channel will offer new and curated content by Greek artists and personalities from around the world. It will include Greek-inspired music, gastronomy, theater, dance, sports, and fashion as well as videos of destinations and experiences from all over Greece.

Visit

Being at home doesn't mean you can't "visit" Greece. Through www.discovergreece.com, visitors can enjoy rich content and inspiring digital experiences. Archaeological sites and museums, villages and traditions, gastronomy, sightseeing, enjoying nature and of course the sea ... all from the safety of your home.

Learn

This time presents unique challenges for businesses and professionals. Digital skills are more important than ever – whether one is working from home, connecting with customers, or distance learning – so we want to help you with the free online training courses provided by Grow with Google. The courses are flexible and personalized, designed to build your confidence and skills. Learn about creating a digital marketing plan, using social media effectively, the art of storytelling, and much more. Staying at home can also mean staying ahead.

 

Wherever you are, while we're apart at home, let's stay together!

To discover #greecefromhome, please click here

Due to this year's unprecedented circumstances, Katerina Evangelatos, Artistic Director of the Athens & Epidaurus Festival, unveiled the original concept and planning behind the 2020 program privately, through a moving video. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, performance dates are not included in the press kit.

We all hope that this year's Festival will come to fruition as soon as circumstances allow it, with as few disruptions as possible.

 

 

The Athens & Epidaurus Festival is Greece’s leading cultural event and one of the oldest performing arts festivals in Europe (1955). Each year, the Athens & Epidaurus Festival presents performances from acclaimed artists in theatre, dance, and music and attracts large audiences from around the world.

 

The festival takes place annually in the months of June, July, and August. More specifically, the Athens Festival performances are held between June 1st and mid to late July while the Epidaurus performances are held every Friday and Saturday, from early July to mid-August.

 

In Athens the festival is held at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, Peiraios 260, and Opening to the City. In Epidaurus it takes place at Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus and the Little Theatre of Ancient Epidaurus. Site-specific performances are presented in various neighbourhoods of Athens and Piraeus, including outdoor spaces and archaeological sites, thus expanding the Festival’s scope and audience and encouraging spectators’ active engagement.

 

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XpatAthens is proud to be a Media Sponsor of the Athens Festival

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