Initiator is an international artist-in-residence programme focusing on installation art, giving the opportunity to emergent artists, who have graduated from Schools of Fine Arts in Greece and abroad, to conceive an artwork and experiment with small scale installations, under the guidance of experienced artists and curators. This year' selected artists resided and co-worked in Elefsina for a total period of one month; the result of their effort will be open to the public from November 8 until December 16, 2018. 

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Building on the tradition of commissioning art installations at Paleo Eleourgio (Old Oil Mill), Eleusis 2021 aims to transform the city into an open workshop at the disposal of artists, where the encounter with the artworks becomes part of the everyday life. Specifically, Initiator has an educational character and takes the form of an in-situ exercise, emphasizing on the production process as a series of relationships between the city, the citizens and the artists. Art is an encounter. Eleusis 2021 focuses on supporting artists in their first professional steps, providing them with the space and time to work on their ideas and the technical and financial resources to realize them.

Based on the structure of the ancient ceremony of the Eleusinian Mysteries, we attempt to create new ceremonies, contemporary initiations to contemporary secrets. The structure is triadic: the curators are the mystics who have the ability to interpret the particular codes of the installation, the artists are initiated for the first time, and the “epopteia” (supervisors) are the collaborators who are at the highest degree of initiation and have a deep knowledge of Eleusis.

The initiation process to installation art was carried out in collaboration with the 40mcube, art centre
in Rennes and in particular with the curator Anne Langlois, and the artist and founder of Mosquito Coast Factory in Nantes, Benoît-Marie Moriceau. Also, under the “supervision” of Giorgos Skianis, founder and, for many years, head of the visual art installations at Paleo Eleourgio, of Kalliopi Papageli, for many years in charge of the archaeological site and the Archeological Museum of Elefsina, as well as the collector Kostas Lykidis. Finally, in collaboration with the artistic team of Eleusis 2021 and in particular, with the Artistic Director Kelly Diapouli and the Director of Contemporary Art Eleni Riga, who is responsible for the design and coordination of the programme. The pilot was launched on October 8th 2018, with a one-week intense workshop, a period of in-situ research and production, culminating with this exhibition.

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Eleusis 2021 European Capital of Culture