A Delicious Place

Kaimakli is a traditional neighbourhood on the eastern side of Nicosia located along the buffer zone that divides the island into two, after the 1974 war. The neighbourhoods’ somewhat edge condition has protected it from the rapid development taking place in the early 1980’s, but it has also increased its isolation over time. During the last decade, empty houses and low rents have attracted an inflow of new inhabitants, and has given rise to a mixed social structure of migrants and young artists, new and old residents.

Despite the diverse social makeup, of the neighbourhood there is little social interaction amongst the different groups. One of the objectives of the local placemaking activities, like the “Pame Kaimakli” festival, organised by Urban Gorillas, is to provide ways to overcome the distance between ‘local’ and ‘other’ residents, thus contributing to create a healthier social environment for everyday urban life.

 “Pame Kaimakli” is an annual community event that aims to explore ideas of publicness, co-creation and community engagement through creative interventions with the collaboration of residents and artists.  Since its launch in 2013, the festival has been adopting artistic practices to foster exchanges between the neighbours, local and invited artists and the general public.

Activities

This year, “Pame Kaimakli” festival will take place from the 3rd to the 14th of September 2020. During the course of two weeks, the festival will host a series of performances, film screenings, open-air dinners, exhibitions and online discussions, around the role of food in the placemaking process. The A-Place program will be hosted in the Festival through the “A Delicious Place” placemaking activity.

“A Delicious Place” will take the form of a pop-up cinema and series of curated dinners. It will  include the following activities:

- a curated series of international film screenings
- screening of short films from the A-Place network focused around the idea of food and placemaking actions within the partnership
- a series of discussions and curated dinners

In this year edition, the festival's main theme is revolving around the topic of food as a socio-cultural and placemaking activity. “A Delicious Place” will host video stories relating to communities, places and food. It will also host an open and networked discussion on the topic of placemaking and the role of food, at a time for environmental, social, economic, and health crisis. The A-Place partners will participate in “A Delicious Place” pop-up cinema by contributing a short documentary/film which presents community actions taking place in their respective cities, in relation to the act of making, sharing, or celebrating notions of food and food production. 

Objectives

The activities taking place in “A Delicious Place” will contribute to the following project objectives:

- To develop and apply creative placemaking practices which help to reveal the manifold meanings that the various individuals and social groups give to the places they share. To create meaningful connections between places between different cities and cultures, around the common topic of food and its relationship to the physical territory.

- To create a cross-disciplinary learning space arising from the confluence of the artistic practices recorded in the partner documentaries  intertwined with local placemaking activities. The discussions taking place will generate an awareness within the community about the cultural meaning of food. The screening of parallel actions within the A-Place network will exemplify these very diverse processes, and connect them to those taking place within the local community. The learning place will overcome geographic boundaries, but also boundaries  between academia and society, and between disciplines.

- To explore the role of networked artistic practices in the creative placemaking process, by embedding them in the community. The action will engage other stakeholders (residents, students, educational staff),  in the co-creation process in the physical and digital space.

- To exploit the capacities of digital technologies creating new links between representations of places (videos, photographs, stories) disseminated through digital networks.