Traces of Commerce
Year: 2014 | Status: Completed | Partners: City of Athens, Athens Development Agency, Merchants Social Security Public Organisation, AT Management | Team: Haris Biskos (Founder, Director), Martha Giannakopoulou (curator in charge), Clelia Thermou (program coordination), Konstantinos Stamatopoulos (graphic design & web development), Stathis Mamalakis (director of photography) | Program Budget: 25.000 Euros | Funding: Athens Development Agency-Project Athens Program
Traces of Commerce was organised as an initiative to reactivate a dead zone of Athens, “Stoa Emporon” (Arcade of Merchants) and its small shops, a part of the city which has been lifeless, empty of public activities, for about 20 years. The fundamental goals of this project were, on the one hand to give life back to a neuralgic space of the city with important urban specificities and spatial structure and on the other to create a framework for synergies among creative interdisciplinary collaborations, forms of local governance (Municipality of Athens, Athens Development and Destination Management Agency) and public organisations (Social Security Fund for the Merchants). Critical parameter of this project, based on which we defined the concept of urban regeneration, was the active participation of citizens, in the scale of the neighbourhood, into the productive activities of the program. For a period of one month, we created an environment of collaborative activities, with the participation of local community, technicians, experts and stakeholders inside the physical space of the arcade. The small shops of the arcade operated in the beginning as laboratories for exploring materials and merchandising activities, then as spaces inside which the actual implementation of design proposals took place throughout participatory workshops open to the public and finally as exhibition spaces showcasing the physical outcomes of the program.
