Salutes
Address by the Mayor of Thessaloniki
This year’s festival is an anniversary event marking half a century of ‘Dimitria’.
This top cultural institution of Thessaloniki has chosen a foetus ultrasound image for its logo this year, the slogan being “Futureval”, to illustrate rebirth, a course to things new, bold and pioneering, despite the adverse circumstances of economic asphyxiation.
In celebrating its golden jubilee, “Dimitria Festival” continues its strong history and grows with the city, embracing the future in an experimental mood reflected in new avant-garde trends, drama and dance performances, music concerts, visual art exhibitions, stage arts, film shows, workshops and urban acts. The festival promotes openness and the city’s will for revival, encourages constructive dialogue and reflection, and confirms the capacity of the city to rise to the occasion of highly demanding artistic and organizational standards. Furthermore, it incorporates, in a creative and substantial manner, public places in the artistic life of the city.
Additionally, at this year’s event, seizing the opportunity of this being the international year of light, the festival transforms the city into a kaleidoscope and highlight forms, lines and the profile of its unique architectural monuments through the play of light and its multi-colour iridescence.
So, I am inviting all of you to participate in the top artistic feast of the city, to be inspired by versatility and the creations of young, restless people, and join the various agencies of the city, including the Thessaloniki Port Organisation, the city’s International Fair and Museums as well as its active entrepreneurial community.
I warmly thank all artists for their participation and everyone involved for their invaluable help; I wish every success to the 50th Anniversary Dimitria Festival Event.
Yiannis Boutaris, Mayor of Thessaloniki
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Deputy Mayor of Culture, Education and Sports
Thessaloniki 11.9.2015
A place of sensitive balance between today and tomorrow, a place whose economy is shrinking and creativity is booming, a place of extreme contrasts, a “passageway” of people, politics, action, a place of borderline melancholy and pressing impasses.
A city with a colourful history, a city with multiple cultural influences, with a powerful memory and an awkward present, in crisis, in search of an identity, in search of a modern-day Ariadne to lead it out of the labyrinth of its dead-ends, standing up to the collapse, insisting, reacting, discovering avenues and momentum for growth, struggling with its introversion, turning the worries of tomorrow into the action of today. A city that dares to look ahead, flirt with its cosmopolitan history.
A 50-year-old festival recording the history and cultural journey of its city, a festival that touches the meaning of the crisis, in which the uncertainty and awkwardness of our time become motivation, a cause for challenges and goals set by new activities and innovative actions.
A festival that locks down its past, resists its present and overturns its character, dealing with the future in a new framework of reflection and dialogue, finding its strengths in the present and planning its future.
“F” for Festival, “F” for Future, Futureval for our future festivals.
This year's Dimitria is closing a great circle and is starting fresh, during a troubled period, as an antidote, in search of new content, the modern word, proposing new forms of artistic expression and action, daring to function through art and creativity as a mechanism of social cohesion, overturning uncertainty, cooperating, asserting, supporting pluralism without limits and frameworks, mobilizing creators and inspiring citizens in search of a just, equal society.
This year's Dimitria has been restructured into a meeting place, a place for the exchange of ideas, proposals, a place of dialogue for the acceptance of our differences and a place to exceed our cultural barriers, a place for synergies in growth and extroversion.
The 50th Dimitria provokes the city's past and present, as it traverses all of its history and memories with theatre, music, dance, performances, visual arts, the spoken word, research, cinema, workshops, and day meetings.
The 50th Dimitria dares, because art is knowledge and knowledge is action.
Elli Chryssidou, Deputy Mayor of Culture, Education and Sports
