Sanctuary City

Sanctuary City is a work by the visual artist Eirini Linardaki, activated in the public space of Fokionos Negri street in Kypseli, Athens, on 28/29/30 March 2024, and accompanied by a public program of conversations and workshops. It is a socially engaged art project developed with the input of children and young people from both established and more recently arrived communities in the 6th District of the Municipality of Athens. The work was commissioned by Counterpoints (UK/GR), and was developed in collaboration with the 26th Primary School of Athens, Network for Children’s Rights (NCR), Unicef Greece, Athens Comics Library, and The Home Project. The title “Sanctuary City” is a reference to the term used in ancient Greek democracies about sacred places, as well as to the municipal jurisdictions that, most typically in North America, resist the efforts of the national governments to enforce immigration law. The sanctuary is the refuge that people were at all times entitled to seek, but nowadays is often overruled by hostile migration policies.

Sanctuary City is the second in a three-part series of commissions launched with Adrian Paci’s installation piece, We Apologize, presented on Victoria Square, Athens, in 2021. Paci’s work generated a heated debate around the issue of public space, prompting many people to engage with the piece and question “Who is ‘we’? Is it us? Or is it them?”. These responses to Paci’s work encouraged curators Almir Koldzic and Niovi Zarampouka-Chatzimanou to continue working in the wider neighborhood, but this time with the view of including a broader “we” in the making. The result was an invitation to Eirini Linardaki – an artist with a long-term experience of working with communities in public spaces – to develop a public art project with the youngest residents of the city, coming from both recently arrived and more established communities.