Skip to content
Search

Dr Faye Tzanetoulakou is an Art Historian / Art Critic / Exhibition Curator.  

She holds a PhD with Honours in Contemporary Art History from the Department of History at the Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2019. 

In 2025, she will complete her postdoctoral research at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly. 

She studied Art History at the University of Glasgow, Integrated MA Honours, 1992-1996. 

She was admitted and attended MPhil courses at Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2001-2002.  She teaches Social Function of Art, and Art and Materiality, at the University of West Attica, while also being a University Fellow at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly. 

She was awarded a scholarship for research on Digital Art in Greece, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2020-21.  She was a fellow of the NEON Curatorial Exchange program in London, Whitechapel Gallery, 2020. She was a member of the artists selection committee for the DESTE Prize, 2013, and was the National Commissioner for the 7th Baltic Biennale of Poland, 2007.

In 2024, she was elected as International Board Member of AICA International. From 2011 to 2024, she was elected Special and General Secretary to the Board of the Greek Section of the International Association of Art Critics, AICA Hellas. She co-curated the biennial exhibition of contemporary Greek art “THEOREMATA,” at both the National Museum of Contemporary Art and EMST, and co-organized the AICA Hellas Artistic Contribution Award. She participated with the Board of AICA Hellas in the Selection Committee for the Greek participation in the Venice Biennale, 2017-2024.

Spiros Derveniotis is a cartoonist. A scenography graduate of the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos, he went on to collaborate with numerous newspapers and magazines as a political cartoonist and comic artist, publishing 14 comic albums. Since 2019, he has been Head of Communications at MeRA25. He serves the Board as an unpaid member.

Nikos Kanarelis is a visual artist who lives and works in Athens, Greece. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he also completed an MA Course in Visual Arts.

He has directed programs which concern the application of artistic practice as a form of treatment by art graduates collaborating with mental health units. He is also a research associate for cultural programs.

He has held six solo show exhibitions, while he has taken part in many group exhibitions in Greece and abroad and has organised and curated numerous art exhibitions.

He tries to keep his works open to interpretation, to have them relate to many issues – one of which is the contemporary world. His paintings always encapsulate the absurdity of existence and the complexity of human relationships.

Danae Stratou was born in Athens, Greece. She studied Fine Arts and specialized in Sculpture and Installations at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London (1983-1988). She taught as Adjunct Professor at the postgraduate programme of the Athens School of Fine Arts (2007-2013).

Her work consists of large-scale site-specific installations and audio-visual environments. She uses various media ranging from digital and audio technology, video, photography as well as metal and natural materials and elements. The artist uses a minimal, geometric visual language and engages in contemporary issues such as the climate crisis, immigration, life in contemporary cities, the growth of population, the relation to the environment as  well as political and social tensions worldwide. From 1997 until today she has a systematic presence in important group and solo exhibitions internationally.

Representative of her work are projects such as: Desert Breath (1997), one of the largest land art installations worldwide located in the Sahara Desert, The River of Life (2004), a video installation recording the flow and rhythm of the world’s seven largest rivers, and Cut – 7 Dividing Lines (2007), a photographic installation that investigates the connections between politically or religiously divided parts of the world, Upon the Earth Under the Clouds (2017), her largest site-specific installation in Greece conceived for the Old Mill and the ancient city of Eleusis. She has exhibited widely, including in the 48th Venice Biennale, Italy (1999), the 1st Valencia Biennale, Spain (2001), La Verriere, Fondation D’ Enterprise Hermes, Belgium (2010), Istanbul – Culture Capital of Europe 2010 International Program, Turkey (2010), the Adelaide International Festival 2012: Restless, Australia (2012). 

In 2010 she initiated and co-founded the non-profit organization Vital Space, a global, interdisciplinary, cross-media art platform addressing the pressing issues of our time. Since 2016 he has been active in DiEM25 and has played a central role in the implementation of DiEM Voice, the movement’s artistic platform, which aims to strengthen the dialogue between art and politics at a broader level.

She was elected Chair of the Steering Committee of mέta, the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation, which through research and art, aims to support, develop and expand the goals of MeRA25, DiEM25 and the Progressive International. She holds the position of unpaid chairman of the Board.

Nicholas‘ view on postcapitalism – a contribution to mέta:

Is post-capitalism a useful analytical construct? Well, maybe. There is no date on the birth certificate of capitalism, nor is it possible to put a date for its demise. Nevertheless, more than 17 decades ago, in a descriptive, analytical, revolutionary, and visionary manifesto, the young Marx and Engels had described the creative and destructive nature of capitalism. We live in a different world now, where the driving forces of capitalism, economic, social, political, and ecological have taken us.

Globalization, physical and virtual, is today much more complex and intensified. It changes the nature of economic competition and facilitates the concentration and centralization of capital and the real subsumption of labor to it. The increased mobility of capital and its migration to low-wage economies bereft of workers’ rights has put pressure on wages and workers’ rights in the industrialized economies of the West and increased the precariousness of employment for large parts of the working class, and throws working people into poverty. The fall of the Soviet countervailing power and the defeat of the Left has left capital – international and domestic – to enforce its terms on labour reversing the gains made by the latter after the Second World War. The winner-takes-all technology, the enhanced possibility of surveillance and control, the manufacturing of consent, and manipulation of information and opinion formation all had led to a society of increased inequality of wealth, income, access to education and health, and living conditions. Changes in the economy led to changes in politics.

Neoliberal policies require increasingly authoritarian solutions. The discontent of the people is not capitalized by the Left but by xenophobic and nationalistic politicians offering easy solutions and blaming immigrants for their country’s predicament. In Brussels, a wasteful and unaccountable bureaucracy selectively uses a discredited economic theory to create an economic universe of supposedly free-market, and hence ‘optimal’, arrangements. They impose an artificial non-market regime that serves the ends of the bureaucracy and the European capital and enforces austerity on the peoples of the EU. They use the repayment of an unpayable debt as one of its main instruments under the guise of EU solidarity while assuming the Calvinist moral high ground.

There are no obvious or easy ways out of this dystopia. The pandemic only exacerbated and made it clear for all to see the limits and contradictions of the capitalist order and its virulent mutations. There is no silver bullet to kill the vampire. We must fight from below on all fronts.

As an educator, let me offer a glimpse of a possible utopia or a facet of it. “For a world in which everyone can be a scholar”, a phrase suggested to me by a close friend and comrade. As it is today, education, especially tertiary education, is becoming increasingly inaccessible to the many, and the educational process itself follows a ‘business model’ that mimics the ‘efficiency experts’ practices on the shopfloor, streamlined and inimical to critical thinking. Imagine, instead of a market-oriented education commanded by bureaucrats, an education free for all at any level. Scholarships would be amply available even for those who cannot afford “free” education. Teaching should be done with a view to promoting critical thinking, and the assessment of teachers and institutions should be freed from inane and distorting metrics betraying their Taylorist origins. Research conducted in state-funded institutions should be published in open-access journals and books. Society would have changed the intellectual property laws and made it possible for anyone with internet access to enjoy the fruits of human genius. Public educational institutions should devote more time to allowing the diffusion of their research and ideas to the general public with an open-access model that would make it possible for everyone to be a scholar, even without a formal tie to the academic world. We would then have a more open, more democratic, more critical, more informed, more inclusive society, a society of dialogue, and ultimately a more productive society. In such a society, production will serve the needs of the many.

Professor Nicholas Theocarakis is a professor of economic theory and history of economic thought at the University of Athens. He studied Economics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and at the Churchill College of Cambridge University, where he graduated in 1979 and would later receive his doctorate in economics. He has co-authored Modern Political Economics: Making sense of the post-2008 world with Yanis Varoufakis and Joseph Halevi. In March 2015, he was appointed General Secretary of Fiscal Policy, leading the technical negotiations of the Greek Ministry of Finance with the Eurogroup.