Documentary: Building Communities of Commons in Greece

A documentary on networks in Sarantaporo area produced by the media arts collective Personal Cinema:

Sarantaporo area, situated at the North of Greece, is an agricultural and husbandry region, also hit by the crisis. But even prior to the crisis, state’s attention to the area was poor. Youths were migrating to big cities or abroad. There was no Internet connection, and locals were isolated and deprived of basic services, e.g. medical aid.

At 2010 a group of people forms a community wireless network aiming to connect the villages among them and with the rest of the world. In time, and as the project matures, Sarantaporo.gr community aims even further. They want to be the catalyst so that the locals (re)organize cooperatives based on the wireless network, (re)enliven their economy, make it sustainable, more extrovert and independent of state and corporative control.

In doing so, they produce knowledge and build bridges between the hi-tech of a wireless network community and the real-life challenges of a rural community.

What are these challenges? How can a community be born and how are the existing ones transformed or affected during this course? What are the real-life stories of the people involved, one way or another, into this process? How can an effort in a small rural population in a remote part of crisis-ridden Greece relate to an ICT project in Catalonia University and -in a broader context- to the efforts to construct a new common ground for peoples in Europe?These are some of the inquiries we explore in the documentary.

In October 2015, the media arts collective Personal Cinema which produced the documentary, in collaboration with the Sarantaporo.gr team, launched a crowdfunding campaign at the Spanish crowdfunding platform goteo.org and succeeded to collect an amount of money that facilitated the realization of the documentary.

The documentary music score can be downloaded free or with a contribution to the artist here.

Credit list of the documentary and crowdfunding campaign contributors here.

Related texts to the documentary, the campaign and the Sarantaporo.gr Community, here.”

Greek and English subtitles are available (use the CC button at the Youtube player).
Optionally, choose: Settings/options/background opacity/25%.

This documentary was originally published here.

Photo by INCITE

Photo by INCITE

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