They seek to listen to fellow-citizens engaged in different organisations of the grassroots solidarity movement (a clinic, a pharmacy, a kitchen, a school). In the course of many conversations, the social imaginary of the citizens unfolds as a living continuity.

When the aganaktismeni (the outraged) occupied the public squares in Athens in 2011, a collective social and political experiment unfolded that laid the foundations for an unprecedented grassroots movement on a scale that is rarely seen, centered on the principles of solidarity, direct democracy and equality. Robin Vanbesien dialogues with this solidarity movement in order to investigate how myth and tragedy return to find a connection with everyday life.

Robin Vanbesien: “I went to Athens with the idea of staging the story of Oresteia – the part in which furies become the guardians of a newly established justice – with theater actors and citizens involved in the solidarity movement. In the encounter with the Athinians, the idea of superposing an allegorical fiction of the ancient Greek tragedy upon the social present of Athens 2016 crumbled. The actors fell silent and withdrew into the role of listeners to the practical consciousness of the citizens, or what is being lived through organizing a society parallel to the Greek state. Suddenly, a gap opened between the received interpretaton of ‘crisis’ and ‘solidarity’ and the practical experience of these words. While a representative portrait of a social movement seemed inadequate, something else entered into focus, a particular quality of social experience and relationships that couldn’t be described in formal concepts of worldview and ideology. Perhaps the closest term for this is Raymond Williams’ ‘structures of feeling’: a kind of feeling and thinking that is social and material, thoughts as felt and feelings as thought from the known complexities and uncertainties, forms of confusion and unease.”

At the night of the preview, Sarma and Vanbesien will distribute 'Partisan Welfare. Group Phantasy as Social Infrastructure.', an essay by Valeria Graziano as a preview to the the forthcoming publication 'Under These Words (Solidarity Imaginary)', produced by Sarma.