GREECE

The Village of Psarades, Greece is the base of the Prespes Residency, being initiated in various forms since 2007. Artistic Venues (Visual March to Prespes, International Encounters/Conference), Educational Programs (the graduate programs “Visual Arts and Landscape: Approaches to Natural and Urban Space”, “Clinical Sociology and Art”), Funded Programs (“Human-Bear Coexistence” and the current “Walking and Local Communities”) have established Prespa and most specifically Psarades as an International Residency Program.

Over the years since 2007 the activities of “Visual March to Prespes” have initiated the area as a place of Return. Prespa is an open Laboratory where art ideas, and practices are implemented in relation to the specificities of the landscape but also with broader conceptual issues. Return to Prespa initiates thoughts, ideas, processes and venues that move beyond the conventionalities of established art-world venues. Artists, students, scholars, and scientists are traveling to Prespa, they explore the place, they come in touch with the local community, they shape their communities. In that way new forms of art are initiated, innovative concepts are introduced, ways to explore personal and collective identities are initiated.

Walking and Community-based practices have become over the years the main art venues in all practices implemented in Prespa Residency. Walking is initiating the way the body navigates in the environment, allowing the individual to sense the place, the understanding of communities, of the other, and of ourselves. Community-based practices allow the de-objectification of art, the de-conceptualization of the “safe” art practices often followed in the current art-world. These two approaches are shaping the practices implemented in Prespa Residency, backed by critical practice that places the outcomes, tactile and non-tactile, in a broader conceptual framework.

The Prespa Residency has become the nucleus of all the above, it is attracting practicing practitioners from all over the world who travel to Prespa to encounter a unique way of approaching not only art but also society at large.