Strategies for Sustaining the Artist-Run Space
With Guest Researcher Frieda Ford
PEDION TOU AREOS Park, ATHENS

We started with an impromptu team building exercise in which we joined together to raise a beautifully hand crafted canopy. A portable art space/shelter in Pedion tou Areos Park to think and talk beneath. Over baskets of strawberries and cherries we got to know each other. In this workshop for arts/grassroots organisers and those interested in DIY alternative structures, we explored the question ‘how do we sustain ourselves and support each other to keep arts/grassroots organising surviving and thriving in light of the challenges we face?’ Working from a series of interviews from artist-run/grassroots spaces and wider case studies, we shared questions, challenges, experiences and support for each other through writing activities, games and discussion to co-produce knowledge.



This workshop was created by Lala resident and Researcher Frieda Ford with interactive exercises by Mouries Collective, from our new publication, Picknicking Matters. 

The results of this workshop, alongside the interviews with arts organizations, will contribute to an ever-growing online resource accessible to all, that will serve as a toolkit for organizers internationally to generate and share their own challenges and solutions to the many questions we face as builders of self-organized spaces. These are spaces that provide community-centered arts practice responsive to local context and the vitality of independent cultural life as a resistance to the homogenization and commodification of mainstream art world.

Frieda Ford is an Edinburgh based film/textiles artist with a socially engaged practice that centers participant led methodologies.