Proposal for Draftsmen Congress. Athens, December 9th

We are a group of artists and scientists from Berlin, also called
“activists” because of our awareness with the problems of society. We come
from different places: Germany, Russia, Scotland, Spain....

Since the last Berlin biennale of contemporary art, we work together with
some of the artists there and the curatorial team. One of the highlights of
the exhibition was the so-called “Draftmen’s Congress”, proposed by the
polish artist Pawel Althamer.

This is an experiment about discussion without words. Everyone in the
congress becomes an artist, questions and answers flow through the walls of
the room. Or, in the words of the curators:

“The Draftsmen’s Congress is a continuous meeting of people who talk using
images instead of words. Everyone is invited to join the discussion through
paint, charcoal, collage, and other traditional materials and techniques,
and react to issues like current politics, symbols of power, religion,
economic disasters, and so on. Not happy with what other people paint? Use
a paintbrush to cover their images or draw your comments next to them.
Paweł Althamer incites a conversation and asks us to have an honest talk.
Be polite or politically incorrect, frustrated or outraged, and fight
others in an image battle. Picture your love, your hate, your opinions and
demands. Spit out the truth and speak out.

The congress will take place in the St. Elisabeth Church in Berlin-Mitte
[...]. The walls and the floor of the church, covered by a white surface,
are a background for images and can be totally marked by the visitors. Many
Berlin-based artists, architects, and other professionals who use drawings
in their work accepted our invitation to participate in the congress.
Non-professional draftsmen are also invited. In this project, authorship,
hierarchies of expertise, and qualifications are blurred into an enterprise
of illustrating excess, which is free and open to all. [...] The use of
visual language is democratized in a mass conversation that only looks like
an exhibition.”

The next Draftsmen’s Congress will take place in Warsaw on the 8th and 9th
of december. Our aim is to do a parallel “conversation without words” in
Athens, as well as some streaming, connecting live with Warsaw and
interchanging opinions about the experience and topics discussed. This
would be a great experience and probably a lot of new ideas will flow in
order to continue some collaborations between the artist’s and activist’s
groups in Athens,Berlin and Warsaw.

The political content of the event is not at all fixed. Everyone can
externalize the problems that affect them more, and open a
“pictured-deabte” around them. All topics are welcome from capitalism,
religion, gender to migration or sexuality.

We really hope we can work together on this day and have such a great
experience as it was in Berlin last spring.