Started with the name Permaculture Solidarity with a wider group of people for Spaces for Solidarity; we Iris Diaz Carrasco, Liana Kuyumcuyan, Theo Prodromidis, and Vladimir Us decided to continue the project we developed. For the past six-month period, our aim was to map organizations and initiatives that work for solidarity in their local context, focused on education and learning methodologies that developed bottom-up according to the local needs.
Since we are located on the edge of Europe, where four of us are working from Spain, Turkey, Greece, and Moldova, we aim to see what kind of local scaled informal structures and networks can be developed to solve the country-scaled problems. As our main aim was to highlight the difference of geographies we are in, we seek to create an archive of solution-making that naturally evolved with cultural habits, but can be exchanged with a wider audience without limiting it to the national identities.
The activist initiatives and organisations we contacted are non-governmental institutions or informal structures that are working with the active participation of citizens and need visibility, especially in their locality. We focus on the topic of education in relation to art and urbanism, and map them to find the common points of different civic movements happening in different countries, to possibly create a connection between them, or simply exchange methodologies and solution making ways as a new learning mechanism towards activism.
There are many cultural, political, economical, and educational differences in the countries even though they are united under the European Union system. Especially the South-Eastern countries have faced more different historical changes that led their citizens to construct different informal structures to solve their problems in daily life. In times where there is no stability, we believe the value of information and experience exchange between places who already created solutions, didn’t face the problems yet or are facing it currently.