“The neighbourhood. What is a neighbourhood? Do you live in this neighbourhood? Are you from the neighbourhood? Have you changed neighbourhoods? Which neighbourhood do you live in now?” Georges Perec, Species of Spaces

The Synikismos Festival opens with the residents of the neighbourhood introducing themselves and guiding the spectators-walkers through the alleys of Synikismos and along their own personal routes. The first Routes to the Roots walk took place in 2016, conceived and directed by Euripides Laskaridis (OSMOSIS group) in collaboration with Aspasia-Maria Alexiou and the Association of Asia Minor in Eleusis. Old and new residents of the area opened their homes and welcomed the spectators to share with them stories and memories, thoughts and traditions. The walk took the form of a neighbourhood celebration, as the residents sang and cooked for their visitors. In 2018, as the opening of the first Synikismos Festival, a second walk took place, which stirred up the questions of the first and raised many more. Can such a walk become an annual ritual of the residents, a singular celebration that honours the history of Synikismos while shedding light on the present? How does the creation of the Synikismos Festival, a series of artistic events that take place not in a building intended for performances but in various places across the area, affect the neighbourhood and its residents? And above all, how could such an event explore and bring to light the processes through which collective memory is formed, without trying to replace them?

Synikismos, as the place where the Asia Minor refugees of 1922 settled, remains to a large extent a site of memory, a neighbourhood whose place names recall the names of beloved — now distant — places. The phenomenon of forced population movement lies at the very founding core of this neighbourhood. While preparing the previous walks, we observed different ways, more or less systematic, of preserving memory and passing on traditions. At the same time, we came to know a living neighbourhood that changes and evolves. The memories of this settlement survive in the architecture of the area, while objects that are at once historical documents and family heirlooms have been gathered in the Museum of History and Folklore of the Association of Asia Minor in Eleusis. Songs and traditional dances are an experiential way for “the old to remember and the young to learn”, while family recipes seem to hand down, in a spontaneous and personal way, memories of taste, habits and recipes that pass from one generation of the family to the next.

Routes to the Roots #3 focuses precisely on this permeation of the cultural heritage of the past into the everyday life of today’s residents of Synikismos; on how younger residents, whether descendants of the Asia Minor refugees or not, approach and reshape this heritage; and on the possibility of a wider dialogue between contemporary art and the artworks of the past.

Conception – Direction: Aspasia-Maria Alexiou

Collaboration: Dimitra Mitropoulou

With the participation of residents of the Synikismos area

Video Routes to the Roots #1: Dimitris Triantafyllou and Stelios Keramidas

Production: Eleusis 2021

We thank the Association of Asia Minor in Eleusis and its president, Mrs Georgia Giagtzoglou-Antoniadou, for their collaboration and help.

The first two Routes to the Roots walks were conceived and directed by Euripides Laskaridis, with dramaturgical collaboration by Aspasia-Maria Alexiou.