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I worked with a group of 18 young practitioners - mainly but not exclusively fine arts and architecture students. The Perceiving Academy curriculum included walks led by experts on various knowledge fields, centered around the way in which we see and perceive the city as space, as well as on how we co-develop structures and relations within it. As a reaction to their walks, the participants designed, constructed and publicly presented a series of temporary sculptures-interventions-structures that functioned as a point of convergence within public space, a place for meetings and debates, a starting point for renegotiating the interpretation and use of urban landscape. These constructions were presented on Thursday, July 14 and were put together on location with the assistance of the public. This initial phase of the Perceiving Academy is an introduction to a long-term program that the artist is currently developing in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki and the Municipality of Thessaloniki, in the context of the project LABattoir for the Old Slaughterhouse - where the Academy was based for the duration of the residency. As perceivers in the academy, we co-created a constitution of actions as words. Public spaces in the city served as our classroom, our studio, our office, and our laboratory.

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The Academy was a platform for learning how to learn, as well as a sustainable community practice run by participants who inherited the institute platform after the residency ended. Lawyers helped participants formalize the equivalent of a non-profit art collective. The directors of Artecitya were able to use the work produced from this Perceiving Academy as proof-of-concept to generate a 500,000 Euro grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

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