Years pass, our lives move on, old wounds heal.
FYTA were HONESTLY ready to bury the hatchet with DESTE and New Museum. But fate decided otherwise. New Museum was back in town, back in our lives, planning yet another exhibition with desperate up-and-coming-but-never-reaching greek artists, titled “The Same River Twice” (LOL). This time, they decided that in addition to the exhibition, they wanted to put together a map / tour guide of all “exciting” athenian art projects. It would be their way to give something back to the community (instead of money). What a surprise, they ended up contacting another project we were involved with, the performance night Glam Slam. We made it clear to them that Glam Slam was connected with FYTA. Had they learnt anything from our previous gesture? Or do they have the nerve to repeat the same colonial strategies? We enquired and agreed to meet them when they said they will be in Athens.
Needless to say, they never arranged to meet us after all, when they were doing their local scouting and didn’t respond to our emails in which we expressed our concerns with their approach (neocolonialism etc). Meanwhile, we spoke to artists that were invited to participate and we were told that the deal with money seemed to be kind of the same again. We decided to pitch the story to Hyperallergic, ArtLeaks and similar media in order to draw more attention to this preposterous story.
Abandoning our short-lived truce, we decided to reactivate our email warfare with New Museum.
We received this response.
We closed our correspondence with the following email. Questions of payment still remain unanswered. The exhibition is due to open on the 21st of June 2019.
