ABOUT

Through the hardest turning point of the country’s modern history, a group of artists and researchers has been travelling for the past three years around Greece, documenting stories of extraordinary people.

With documentary, narrative and photography as a vehicle, they bring to the foreground human stories that have the power to waken, to move and to create spaces of self-reflection and metapraxis, laying the foundations for an experience of transformation. Their goal is to transfer the stories of simple, everyday people, since it’s these stories that form and define the course of each era. They give the floor to people who otherwise wouldn’t be heard, shedding light on diversity and giving prominence to pluralism.

During the second phase of its functioning, the Caravan Project is being transformed into a mobile pop-up space that will travel to various Greek towns fulfilling the educational vision of its contributors for participation and interaction. Its cultural action takes root in indigenous societies with the construction of a pop-up, nomadic space and that, with narrative as a vehicle, it create the conditions for a cultural and social reform of each visited area.

The incorporation of creative procedures within the frame of the suggested pop-up space, which encourages the active involvement and the participation of each local community, will gradually and collectively render the Caravan Project a cultural and collaborative platform attuned to the demands of our times, functioning as a transmitter and recipient of cultural practices and promoting the interconnection of networks and actions and the exchange of knowledge and skills in Greece and abroad.

At the end of its undertaking, an organic encyclopedia of stories will have been created for the first time in Greece. It will be concentrating a lively part of our current history, reflecting, in a modern and active way, the pulse and the constitution of the place we live in. This entire collection of narratives, images, texts, documentaries and reports, will not only enrich the cultural scene of society with stories that would otherwise remain unheard, but will also offer inexhaustible opportunities to researchers, artists and institutions, as well as to everyone else who will turn to them for introspection, reflection, emotion, self-examination and action.

The creation of the pop-up space, in the second phase of the Caravan Project, will enforce the diversity and the pluralism of voices through a multimedia, interactive exhibition, through educational seminars to groups of unemployed people, as well as through the implementation of educational programs in schools of each visited area, thus creating conditions for a social transformation in that location.

TRANSMEDIA DIMENSION

We do not only film stories, but also make them talk to world.
We make use of all mediums that fit because we treat content as one and media as different channels with different language and dispersion parameters. Our captured stories can be either video, photos, recorded sound or even text. On other hand, this content is either being presented live in our exposition popup space traveling accross the country, in international festivals projections etc but also through mainstream and most importantly owned media, that is our website and associated social media.

We didnt choose but rather transmedia dimension is inevitable when promoting intimacy, cross & open platforms, public domain availability, interactivity and targeting a wider & multi-language audience engagement.

AUDIENCE BUILDING / USER ENGAGEMENT

Our audience has 2 levels of proximity. One is the wider public audience interested in experiencing our captured stories. The other is those inspired but also enhanced to help us out in capturing more of such stories.

Our activity is also being unfolded in two levels. One is the physical one, visiting people in their local areas & communities, setting up an popup exposition of our work and point of view and also a workshop space that provides knowledge and the means for producing alike content. Second level is the non-physical one. That is mainstream media & the web. First inform, inspire, diffuse but also provide our captured content and the means for engaged people to contribute more of it. The operation of our web platform is dedicated to the preservation, conservation and dissemination of all captured stories. Much more, having been designed in a crowdsourcing basis, it lays the foundations for content’s enrichment and the perpetual sustainability of the project regardless of own resources.

Website & social media activation is designed in a way that promotes information, education, communication, collaboration and entertainment.  Both our stories and those submitted by community members, forming an organically expanding file, an indexed “bank” of stories. The same metadata used by the creators to characterize material when submitting in application form, here used as filters for website visitors to navigate across stories in multiple modes. Giving the search query, system will return relevant results, namely the stories associated whether video, audio, photos or text.