Connecting

There’s a section in the ACE funding application form in which they ask what our project audience figures will be.

Of course its hard to be 100% sure, you can only guess. Yesterday though, I had an email off the Platform organiser with some actual  figures –  42,000 people visited the exhibition.

An incredible amount…and considerably higher than the estimate I’d put on the application.

We knew there were a lot as it was really difficult to squeeze past the cars in the car park some days. People were actually queueing up to get in.  Its hard to believe anything like that would happen in the UK.

Our website: https://sciartistprojects.wordpress.com/  has had 218 hits since the project started on 24th May.  That’s mainly Greek visitors, but roughly 20% were from the UK. That should change as we start to plan the UK part of the activity.

Our talk went OK in the end, despite the fact that we didn’t have any images.  If it were longer, it would have been a disaster, but 10 mins was just the right amount of time to keep the audience engaged.

When we posted the image above (of the talk) on Facebook, it received 823 hits. I think that’s one of the good things about having so many in the group, each person can share things on their own pages.

A week into the project and a good start for audience figures I think :-)

I started writing a post for this blog yesterday, but because the wifi seems to go in waves here,  it switched off as I tried to publish and I lost everything.

Learning from that, I’m saving as I go along.

Although the experience has been hugely successful so far (I’ll go into that more later) A few things haven’t gone to plan.  I had intended to take my laptop to the Pavilion daily and do some work, write blogs and just generally network… but that just hasn’t been possible. You can connect to the wifi if you get there early enough, but then it just goes.  I suppose its because everyone is on it at once .

The problem is, I was going to put together a powerpoint presentation , thinking I’d have loads of time. I’m meant to do a 10 min presentation tomorrow but now I don’t know how I’m going to do that. It makes me feel so unprofessional now not having anything to show and I think I’m going to have to pull out of it .

But backtracking…. We (and the work)  arrived safely on Tuesday, and we began installing Wednesday morning.  It was quite amusing seeing the huge art trucks pulling up outside , while we walked passed with our work in carrier bags.

We’d been making a mental plan of how the work should look beforehand, so we were able to install quite quickly.  This meant that we were done by mid afternoon and able to sightsee later on.

The next stage is to  create work in response to our experiences, so it was good to get some shots of the Acropolis and monuments around.

Yesterday was a bit ‘odd’. Being a non profit , none commercial art fair, we hadn’t put prices on any of the works….. there was no need to . So when a dealer came round yesterday and asked to buy several works right there and then, it really threw us.  We had to contact the artists (who hadn’t flown with us) and first ask if they wanted to sell…and then how much.   It was just a totally bizarre experience.

Working in shifts, 3 of us were able to head out to the Cycladic museum,  to see the work of Ai Wei Wei. Amazing. Loved it.

Will try to write more later, but so far, we are connecting well with the UK group from Harrington Mill, and are hoping to keep in touch when we all fly back.

Images to follow

When I first got the email in July 2015, from Artemis Potamianou (the exhibition organiser) inviting us to participate in the Platforms project at Art Athina in Athens,  I didn’t really pay too much attention to it.

It was a nice idea, but would involve too much organisation . I had enough on.

I can’t really remember what the turning point was… when I actually thought, OK, its a lot to do, it will cost a packet… but… this is going to be worth it.

Maybe it was when we were discussing our trip to Sweden that had happened earlier that year – a collaboration that had come about from our involvement in Stockholm’s Supermarket a few years earlier…

ArtMobile were in the next booth to us and despite the language barrier, we had struck up a friendship that has lasted years. We had invited them to exhibit with us in Liverpool…. another participant had invited us to exhibit in Jamestown New York a year later ( we all went across)… then last April we got to see ArtMobile’s studio spaces in Vasteras, just outside Stockholm.

Three years, three Countries, still communicating with each other…. sharing ideas. Different ways of exhibiting, different rationale…all the time learning from each other.

You could see our own work evolving… from time consuming complicated themes and framed works in exhibitions with few visitors, to snap decision works and pop up exhibitions that draw the public in, getting them involved .

Yes, the Athens trip would be worth it.  An opportunity to meet a huge array of artists from a different part of the world. New ideas again.

Fundraising began earlier in the year with an auction of donated small works  from the group. That went surprisingly well and we raised more cash than anticipated. The ensuing Crowdfunder didn’t go as well… maybe we had just exhausted the sources of donations from the auction… but £250 (a third of what we wanted) wasn’t too bad really.

I began the Gifts for Arts application from Arts Council…. and here we are… 3 days to go before we travel and ready to meet new people.

Links:

SCI : https://sciartistprojects.wordpress.com/

Supermarket: http://www.supermarketartfair.com/exhibitor/scibase/2012

Art Athina: http://www.art-athina.gr/parallel-programme/platform-project/