PCAI Collection artist George Drivas’ new interactive light installation MOODBOARD, will open to the public on Tuesday, October 8, at 6:00 pm at Kotzia Square in Athens.
MOODBOARD is the product of a collaboration between art and science, a collaboration based on the results of a major research conducted by Nikos Panagiotopoulos, published in his book titled The Citizens Speak about Greece. Among other things, this study noted and examined the growing frustration of citizens, stemming from a sense that their suffering has no space to be expressed; that those in power do not understand the new forms of alienation that pervade their lives and often deprive them the conditions and the reasons for their existence; that no governing authority is addressing the lack of hope from which they suffer.
In such a conjuncture, this public artwork seeks to signal the need to place the citizens at the center of the decisions made about their present and future, and to take into consideration their assessment of the effectiveness of these decisions, in a systematic and participatory way.
MOODBOARD is an interactive light installation that changes color based on how each citizen expresses their feelings on key governance issues, based on a short questionnaire they complete. As such, it aims to signal the need to invent and create a kind of open platform for citizen expression, a new form of Agora, where citizens declare and register their relationship with the institutions representing and managing the issues that affect their lives.
Given the major phenomenon of the crisis of political representation – which served as a stimulus for us to create this work, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the restoration of democracy in Greece – and our shared belief that it is time to imagine and create open spaces and modes capable of accommodating a variety of approaches and confrontations with burning social issues, we attempted to create a language that communicates to those in power the need to safeguard the dignity and take into account the opinion of everyday people, who are often excluded from public discourse and remain invisible.
Design illustration of the project. Sketches of the artwork.
Light Design: Maria Maneta Architectural design: Irini Sapka
Activity aligned with Goals 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17