Vasso Kollia
Secretary General of Youth

Athens: A city where history meets innovation; where classical perfection has successfully managed to retain its position amidst modern and new forms of cultural and artistic expression; where the spirit of our world-renowned classical architects, sculptors, writers, philosophers and politicians is still very much alive, having successfully been blended with contemporary life and progress.
It is the city where, a year ago, the world community came together to revive the ideal of the Olympic Truce and to celebrate the return of the Olympic Games to their motherland.
This was the city that the members of the BJCEM Association had chosen to be the host of the 11th Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean.
Twenty years after the birth of the Biennial institution in Barcelona, the Ministry of National Education of Hellenic Republic "sent out" seven hundred invitations to young creative people from Mediterranean Africa, Middle East and Europe to come to Athens in June 2003 and to bring with them their own "Cosmos."
On the occasion of the event, Ibrahim Spahic, president of the Association of the BJCEM wrote: "For ten days, participants of the 11th Biennial, coming from fifty-two warm landscapes of the Mediterranean and the cold embrace of the Baltic, will have the Cosmos right in their hands.
In the cradle of European and world civilization, during the time of the first contemporary Olympics of Culture and the rhythm of Marathon, on the eve of the Summer Olympic Games, the 11th Biennial will link creative ideas of young artists from Africa, Asia and Europe.
Performances, Visual and Applied Arts, Music, Literature and Gastronomy, are the forms of expression of welcoming the artists (via which we are invited) to join them on the trip through their Cosmos.
Once we stop on our trip at this Symposium, we will let the Muses of Art induce us like the Mermaids of Odysseus' travelers."
So, for ten days, back in June 2003, 700 young artists gathered in Athens, each one to present his own perception of "Cosmos." Through the language of artistic expression as it is translated by contemporary youth, the artists presented to the public the Cosmos they live in, their socio-cultural and historic influences, their fears of tomorrow, along with their hopes and aspirations not only for their own future, but for the world community per se.
It was indeed a very interesting cosmos, extending to the four corners of Europe and the Euro- Mediterranean horizon, from the north shores of Africa and the Middle East, from Albania to the rest of Southeastern Europe, from the Mediterranean shores of European countries up to the lakes of Finland: areas with different national traditions and beliefs, different religious convictions, different socio-cultural roots. But, despite the differences, this Cosmos of young artists of the 11th Biennial converged in a common vision for peaceful coexistence, friendship and inter-cultural dialogue, while giving young people the opportunity to construct a new approach and interpretation of the world through their art, their talent, their imagination and their creativity and innovation.
Moreover, the eleventh edition of the Biennial had an additional distinction owed to the timing of the event. It was organized in a period when Greece held the Presidency of the European Union, amidst the Cultural Olympiad 2001-04, in honor of the incoming Athens Olympic Games of 2004.
Therefore, the 11th Biennial, one of the largest in reference to the number of participating young artists, constituted an exceptional forum for cultural exchange, in parallel to the Olympic Ideal promoted by the hosting city of Athens around the world. "Cosmos: A Sea of Art" was the theme chosen by the organizers of the event.
Film and theater director Diagoras Chronopoulos, president of the 11th Biennial Organizing Committee wrote on the occasion: "We also believe that the role of such an event should not be confined to merely giving the opportunity to the young artists participating in it to present their works for critical evaluation by experts and the public, but that it should at the same time permit them to come into contact with one another, to get to know each other's work and to exchange views and experiences. That is why we, the organizers of the 2003 Biennial, have decided to hold all the events in a single space. The choice behind the Antonis Tritsis Environmental Development Park serves this goal, while at the same time it favors the cultural upgrading of a district in the broader Athens area which was up to now excluded from events of such magnitude.
The infrastructure we have created, the program of events we have scheduled and the conditions of operation of the facilities we have secured are, we believe, a guarantee that the event will live up to the aspirations of the artists participating in it, as well as to the aspirations and the expectations of the public. An event that will be a first-time experience for all."
The artworks presented in the 11th Biennial recorded the ways in which young artists of today depict, invoke, draw or imagine space and time, the natural and artificial landscape, the feasible and the unfeasible, the new aspects behind traveling, the environment and human relationships per se; in other words, how artistic innovation perceives "COSMOS," in all its complexity and simplicity at the same time.
The Athenian people had the opportunity to dialectically explore the new aspects of world expansion and the ways in which we visualize the transcendence of limits of the horizon in our times. We believe that Athens as the place for this thematic Biennial was a successful choice by the BJCEM General Assembly., because it gave young Euro-Mediterranean artists the opportunity to present their work in a city that first comes to the minds of all people as representative of the broader geographical and cultural area through the ages. It is the place where four civilizations come and meet with one another to produce a harmonic, integral and peaceful European environment.
Our country is still considered as an area open for fruitful inter-cultural dialogue, for the development of relationships, but also for confrontation and cultural debate.
The explanation is simple: nothing here is hierarchically organized around a fixed axis; the center is everywhere.
In this sense, the 11th Biennial dealt with some of the most interesting subjects that influence our era and concern young artists: the Cosmos is in reality the way we perceive it. And this is not merely the result of a natural, socio-cultural or mental process, but it also includes in itself all institutional constructions and discursive practices.
A fundamental question that was of concern by young participating artists in the Athens Biennial was if it is feasible to depict and represent the complexity of the contemporary world or if we can only "speak" for ourselves, for our own subjective microcosm, or to just draw from it.
And this dilemma made room for modern youth creativity, having produced innovative artworks and interpretations where cosmographies and the digicosmos harmonically met with cosmopolitanism and globalization through the imaginary world of young creators.
The 11th Biennial activities took place in the Antonis Tritsis Park of Environmental Awareness, at Ilion, a diverse area and a miniature of the Attica Mediterranean landscape of the western part of Athens. The aim of the organizers behind the choice of the venue was the upgrading of a neglected area, which, as expected, was cut off from cultural activities, especially at an international level, which are mostly organized in the city center or close to the renowned archaeological sites of Attica. For years, such a preference gave rise to bias and a general neglect and the undermining of the western suburbs functioning and unitary character.
Yet, the aspect of the broader Attica area had started to accelerate in change, mainly due to the incoming Olympic Games of 2004, through a series of long-term interventions within the urban and suburban environment: construction of new public areas and facilities, reform and renovation of formerly neglected and poor areas, extension of the underground "Attico Metro," improvement of the national road and rail network, construction of highspeed motorways and flyovers. This process enabled a re-arrangement of balances and relations between the city center and the periphery.
Thus, the organizers of the 11th Biennial chose an open area in a western suburb as the venue of the event, aiming to profit from this wide renovation process and to overthrow the single-center convictions of the past, by re-locating the "center."
They organized a central cultural and artistic event in the periphery of Athens, a meeting point for the Euro-Mediterranean young artists, an event that could serve to pave the way for the forthcoming changes.
For ten days, from morning to late night summer hours, the suburb of Ilion was full of people who visited the park coming from all directions. They were people of all ages, of all socio-cultural backgrounds, with one thing in common: their high interest and sensitivity towards youth artistic expression and innovation, as well as curiosity to explore young people's interpretations of our world. They were ten days of high-quality exhibitions, theater and dance performances, music from different countries and of different sounds, film night projections in open space, cyber art, installations and literature evenings full of art.
They were also ten days of inter-cultural artistic dialogue among seven hundred young people of many Euro-Mediterranean, Balkan, Middle Eastern and Baltic cities, who presented their interpretations and discovered similarities and differences in the world of other youth. As for the one hundred young Greek artists who were chosen to represent our country in the 11th Biennial, just a short time after the event, we had the opportunity to attend the opening on the National Theater stage of a play written by one of the Greek 11th Biennial participants. We were also glad to congratulate another Biennial film artist who won the first prize for a documentary film in the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, in September 2004.
It is also a pleasure to see solo or group Fine Arts exhibitions in galleries around the country, or to hear of Greek 11th Biennial artists who are developing important careers around Europe.
We believe that it was an important Biennial and we also believe that it would be very interesting if the Hellenic General Secretariat for Youth Affairs, as one of the founding BJCEM Association members, would consider the possibility of organizing a future Biennial that may mark out the cultural and the socio-political impact of the past. The experience of the 11th Biennial and the pros and cons before and during the event can be of great assistance for a more successful edition.
And this is one of our political priority endeavors for the near future.