DORA ZOUMPA, VASILIS NTOUROS, ARIS PAPADOPOULOS

Monumentum is a collectively developed project which seeks to achieve a communally dreamt, practice-based and contextualized prototype for counter-monument making. What would a contemporary counter-monument be today? What would it look like and what would its functions be? 

Using the dry stone wall technique as a metaphor and a vessel into which collective dreams, desires and memories are merged with locality, fiction and texture, the collective hopes to find the invisible connections between the hand-made, the in-between societal frictions and future desires. 

When no mortar is used what are the invisible forces holding a community, a collaboration, a wall, an everyday practice together?

This collaborative endeavor extends beyond the physical construction, as the collective delves deeper into the processes of counter-monumenting and counter-mapping, exploring the intricate intersections of art, nature, and community through art practices, repetition and trial-error attempts. 

Dora studied dance, art history and curation. She recently completed a Permaculture Design Course (PDC) while currently she is attending a training program in Ecopsychology. She is a co-founding member of krama dance company and co-manages the dance studio krama artspace (Athens). She has received support from the Fluxus Laboratory and the Creative Europe scheme i-Portunus. Dora lives and works between urban and more ‘natural’ environments. Her creative interests revolve around moving bodies, expanded choreographic approaches, and participatory and interdisciplinary projects and she is interested in exploring the artistic and collaborative aspects of contact, exchange and learning that emerge through 'human-nature' interaction. She is interested in ceramics, traditional embroidery techniques, food issues and food policy in general. Dora is an active member of ‘Tzoumakers’ community maker space and is interested in traditional building techniques (dry stone, wood, etc.) and regenerative socio-agricultural methods (e.g. permaculture, solarpunk, etc.). As a forager, she collects fruits and seeds and makes tinctures, pickles, jams and sourdough bread.

Vasilis is a PhD student hosted in OpenLab, Newcastle University. His research looks into collaborative and community economy projects focusing on the design of the digital technologies that support them. He regularly collaborates with the members of the research cooperatives P2PLab and OpenLabAthens and is an active member of ‘Tzoumakers’; a rural maker space and a library of tools located in NWest Greece where open hardware design models are tested. He is a member of a housing coop experimenting with the idea of self-help housing, a dumpster diver and a member of a food-saving and sharing group. With Dora, they have been renovating an old rural house located in N.W. Greece which operates under an ‘open door’ policy and has hosted various researchers and artists from different fields. Since 2017, Vasilis has also participated in various small-scale art projects and has collaborated with activists, poets, dancers and choreographers, video artists, gardeners and chefs, dry stone builders, architects/designers, and academics. As an intern, he joined the community running Prinzessinnengarten - an urban garden that is located in downtown Berlin (2018) and L200 - a hybrid and modular physical space that is used by cooperatives and social movements active in Zurich (2022).

Aris is a performer and dance-maker based between Athens, Greece and Aarhus, Denmark. He graduated from the Athens School of Architecture and the National School of Dance, in Greece. He is the co-founder of the choreographic collaboration arisandmartha and was selected as Aerowaves dance artist in 2018. He has been supported through the EDNetwork, FLUXUM Foundation and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports (2018-2023) for dance productions and artistic research. His expanded choreographic practices explore the multitude of visual and physical representations of everyday encounters with the urban landscape, the designing of processes and concept-writing, interdisciplinary approaches in the urban landscape as a field of potentiality, and the reciprocal scheme of embodying landscape vs. materializing an experience. His current artistic research attempts to merge architectural, landscape and performing arts practices into a multidisciplinary approach to current social, choreographic and theoretical questions. He was a resident artist at Onassis AiR Critical Practices International Artistic Research Program 2020 and was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2022.

Dora, Aris and Vasilis have crossed paths in recent years on various occasions (e.g. the Reforesting project, a series of Social Dreaming sessions that Aris facilitated, the Moving Ground project initiated by DDRC) and are currently collaborating on a project that is activated as a counter-monument that will be built using dry stone walling techniques. Departing from this project, the collective is interested in exploring together the processes of counter-monumenting and counter-mapping more in-depth.