Agenda “Memory of Water”

Report of

Partners Meeting, Levadia 31 January – 1 February 2019

Venue: Old Town Hall, 1 Karagiannopoulou str.

 

Present: Iwona Preis, Mary Conlon, Martin Meire Virgine Michils, Liz Gardiner, Lambros Skarlas, Andreas Stamatakis and (Magdalena Zakrzewska, Roman Sebastyanski via skype).

 

First meeting – Artists’ Residency in Levadia

We started the day with a presentation from Mary Conlon about the development of the artists’ residency programme.

Mary referred us back to the core research question that the residencies  are focused on, which is the future of waterfront heritage zones in post – industrial cities.  She mentioned that the artists, during their residencies will have the opportunity to understand ideas about the future plans for the regeneration of the waterfront areas in the host city, to visit the remaining industrial buildings and to meet local people for exchanging views and stories about the common memory of water.

Mary took us through the artists’ requests for support, advice and the purchase of materials during their residencies. She concluded with some recommendations about improving systems around  internal communications.

Later the partners joined the artists who had visited a farm close to the city of Levadia. We all met up at a local cheese factory and, sampling the delicious farm produce, we all had a light lunch on location.

In the afternoon the partners and the artists visited a gallery on the waterfront and the then participated in a local urban lab: a meeting with the Mayor and urban planners discussing the regeneration plans for the river Erkyna.

 

Second day  1st session

The first session of day two was dedicated to the presentation of our proposed digital lab and our emerging digital platform.

Andreas Stamatakis and Lambros Skarlas presented the proposed methodology of the digital lab as a place of dialogue for the entire community embracing the MoW themes. The main objectives of the lab will be debate, communication, dissemination and evaluation of the project through social media platforms involving participants in each city as well as additional cities from the River Cities network who are dealing with similar issues. The digital lab will also be a platform for the promotion of the ongoing artistic work and to stimulate community participation.

The focus will be on bringing together artists and project partners, researchers, architects, urban planners, inhabitants, refugees and policy makers via collaborative social media. Emphasis will be given to co-creation with the ambition to raise the widest possible awareness of the debate about the future for each post-industrial waterfront areas.  Bringing people together in the same digital “places”, exchanging productive and innovative ideas is the aim.

Taking place on 10th April 2019 through live connection via facebook with three sessions lasting two hours each, the digital lab will will explore the similarities/differences/shared knowledge around post industrial waterfront heritage zones in the areas of memory and heritage; access and inclusivity; environmental responsibilities/impacts: plotting the similarities and differences of approach in each city.

2nd session

Lambros Skarlas presented the philosophy and the architecture of the digital platform, memoryofwater.eu that he has designed. He explained to the partners the main sections of the platform.  Accounts were created for all partners in order to be able to upload news, and photos, as well as posts. Gdansk partners have been consulted and have been supported in the creation and management of their own page (conducted in their own local language) through blogger.com. A “Cities Activities” page was created  on the suggestion of the lead partner, and on that page, each city will upload its own events and activities after proofreading from Fablevision. In the News section everybody is encouraged to upload posts, under their own category and even in their own language. For this purpose accounts have been created for every partner.

3rd session

The 3rd session was dedicated to the communication procedure of the programme.  Liz Gardiner informed the partners that Fablevision Studios is responsible for communication of the programme and the social media strategy, and it will work 25 hours per week – giving prominence to the local and the international aspects of the project.

Fablevision will focus on promoting the importance of the project through disseminating information on activities pre, during and post each event and the main objective of communication procedure is to maximise the reach and awareness of MoW through collecting information from partners, curating information, distributing the curated information to partners for circulation through all partners.  Furthermore Fablevision will be responsible for reporting the actual results achieved (ie numbers reached) through the communication strategy.

 

4th session

Martine Meire and Virgine Michils presented to the partners the evaluation plan for the programme which is a long term goal, focusing on expressing desired and actual results of the project:

    • Measuring the outcomes of the programme (raising awareness and knowledge about the programme, supporting the dialogue and discourse among/between people, measuring the attitudes, behaviors and the desires of people).
    • Analyzing the indicators
    • Collecting data for the evaluation of the programme by capturing information or evidence in order to analyze the changes which have been achieved by the programme.  The collection of data can be achieved by interviews, surveys, observation, etc.

 

  • There was discussion about how we collect the data about the total numbers of the people and organizations that need to be connected to the project: ie the  quantitative analysis.

 

5th session

Iwona Preis presented all the necessary steps which the partners have to follow in order to write correctly the documents and financial reports to the EU.

She helped partners with preparing reports through the provision of examples. (invoicing etc.)

On Saturday 2 of February, a visit to the Delphi Oracle was organized by the Municipality of Levadia.