Eleusis 2021 European Capital of Culture invites you on Tuesday, September 11, 2018 at 8 p.m. at the garden of the Old Railway Station of Eleusis to a discussion between the artist Eleftherios Kehagioglou and the Mayor of Eleusis George Tsoukalas, coordinated by the journalist Jenny Tsiropoulou. The discussion will take place within the programme “An elected official and an artist-artisan” in collaboration with the French Institute of Greece.
It is an unusual project that enables an elected official and a French artist-artisan to meet and discuss the city, either as a resident or as a visitor. The programme’s fact-finding missions will also take place in 2018 in Crete and Rhodes.
The artist Eleftherios Kehagioglou, Director of Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde will stay for 5 days in Eleusis, in order to meet the Mayor of Eleusis, George Tsoukalas, as well as local cultural organisations. The city’s Mayor will accompany the artist to parts of the town of his own choice. Every duo (Mayor-Artist) participating in this programme must be prepared to reveal the ways in which they understand and analyze the city with no ifs and buts.
With notes, debates, and the confrontation of hypotheses or fantasies, the duo (Mayor-Artist) decrypts with their own sensitivity the new facts of life in the city, the difficulties, the uses -and the decay- that afflict the city’s everyday life and future.. With successive touches and approaches, and even with surprises, these missions show in which way a more sensitive and vibrant urban development could be of greater importance to citizens. What the city will look like in the next ten years? How do we imagine it and what are the challenges of this transition?
The experiment ends on Tuesday, September 11 with a public workshop with Eleftherios Kehagioglou and George Tsoukalas, coordinated by the journalist Jenny Tsiropoulou. People of Eleusis are invited to discuss the experience and the content that was produced at the meeting of the duo (Mayor-Artist).
The programme “An elected official and an artist-artisan” is part of the Culture 2030 programme, and more specifically, it is part of the Citizens’ Capacity Building programme.
Short bios:
Eleftherios Kehagioglou was born and raised in Thessaloniki and settled in Paris since 1984. He graduated in 1987 from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Department of International Relations) and was destined for a career in diplomacy. In 1990, he resigned from his first post and began an artistic career in circus and theatre, as artistic director, performer, and writer. Since 2007, he is the director of Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde – Centre for Arts du Cirque et des Cultures Emergentes (Bagneux, 92). A internationally recognized place of hybrid experimentation and art education, the Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde is an art factory, a social bond workshop, a platform for international exchanges and a circus school.
George Tsoukalas was born in Athens in 1965. He studied at the Pedagogical Academy of Lamia where he was elected at the Board of Directors of the Students’ Association. He was elected municipal councillor for the first time in 1990 when he was only 25 years old. In the municipal elections of 1994 and 1998, he ran as a candidate city councillor with the list “Human Elefsina”. In 2002 he was elected with the list of Giorgos Abatzoglou. For the four-year period 2003-2006, he became Deputy Mayor supervising the Municipality’s workshops. In the 2006 and 2009 elections, he was re-elected. In the last ones, he was the first one to be elected. Last May, he was elected Mayor of Eleusis for the period 2014-2019.
Jenny Tsiropoulou is a graduate of the Law School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and holds a postgraduate degree in Media and International Communication from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Since 2010 she has collaborated with international media such as Al Jazeera and Euronews and her articles have been published in Middle East Eye, Your Middle East, Al Haaretz, enet.gr, tvxs.gr, METRO, protagon.gr and others. She has worked in London and has worked as a freelance correspondent in Tunisia, where she also organized photo seminars at SOS Children’s Village. He works with VICE Greece and is a member of the ThePressProject research team.
