Pame Kaimakli 2020

Pame Kaimakli is a neighbourhood festival launched in 2013 by the residents of the Kaimakli district and Urban Gorillas. From a series of ad-hoc informal events that were taking place in the private houses of the neighbours, the Festival has grown into a well-known event, welcoming acclaimed artists; it became a cross-disciplinary place where local meets global. It 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. 

Activities

The programme “A Delicious Place” within the Pame Kaimakli festival, included a series of events focusing on the thematic of this year’s edition. Some of the activities are described in Deliverables 4.1-4.2-4.3 “Local placemaking activities 2019-2020”. In this report we will focus on those which use video to foster exchanges and debate around “Food”, and intertwine local video stories produced in Kaimakli with stories from our European network, and beyond. 

These activities focusing on video included: 

1. The production of three video stories about the Kaimakli neighbourhood 

2. A pop-up cinema, with the screening of two international films, that looked into the relationships of place, communities and food 

3. “A Delicious Place” pop-up cinema with video stories, and curated talk 

Objectives

Since 2013, the Pame Kaimakli Festival has been adopting artistic practices to foster exchanges between the diverse social strata of the district, through the participation of local and invited international artists and the general public. One of the objectives of the festival is to provide ways to overcome the distance between ‘local’ and ‘other’ residents, thus contributing to the creation of a healthier social environment for everyday urban life. 

As many of these objectives are equally pursued in the A-Place project, the A Delicious Place activity was an appropriate fit in the 2020 edition of the Pame Kaimakli Festival. The thematic of the 2020 festival focused on the act of making, sharing, and celebrating notions of food production and food consumption. Food as a placemaking topic has great potential to connect and to intrigue interest in commonalities, differences, but also opportunities for creative community actions during times of crisis.