The 5th Little Islands Festival, starting from Sikinos, invites new media and performing arts artists to submit proposals that engage with ecology, anthropology, and science in the enduring dialogue about the relationship between humanity and nature. The island frontier, which like life itself emerges from the liquid element, becomes the principal space for exploring modern contradictions of human geography through art.

In the Cyclades, Nature’s symbols and archetypal patterns -from habitation and cultivation to the need for connection with the sacred, indicated the human imprint on space. Natural constraints imposed by climate and geomorphology led human creativity to capture the “unpretentious”, the “primary” and the “essential” as a claim to the ”necessary”, composing a landscape that mirrors the islanders’ culture, history and values.

In this traditional rural landscape, which seems like it has remained unchanged, contemporary socio-cultural and economic transformations are reflected today. Hyper Tourism, climate change and globalization, as imprinted on space, emphasize the interdependencies between rural-urban and local-global. Yet, at the same time that they tend to erase legacies of the past, they contribute to their re-emergence.

With the power of art and technology, Little Islands Festival explores these interdependencies to rethink life, work, and cohabitation. The cycle of nature becomes the field of understanding and emergence of an imagination that connects sense, mind, and knowledge and articulates what seems to be missing: an ecology as a common practice and under common control, multicultural, diverse and transcendent of the “human” world we live in.

Indicative Search:

• Site-specific projects that explore cultural heritage in relation to the natural environment of Sikinos and the Cyclades in general: windmills, threshing floors, rural dwellings, dry stone walls, terraces and, sacred and archaeological sites.
• Works inspired by traditions, rituals, myths, and customs in conversation with nature.
• Works that explore movements and directions such as Environmental Sociology, Eco-anarchism, Ecofeminism, Eco-communalism, and Deep Ecology.
• Artistic practices with an emphasis on participation.
• Artistic workshops for children and adults on environmental awareness.
• Included in the open call is the LIF Residency and Research Program 2023 where participants will be hosted in Sikinos to create works inspired by the natural and cultural landscape of the island.

They address:

Artists from Greece and abroad, art groups, young creatives, performers, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, architects, thinkers, activists, scientists, technologists, curators, educators and other creatives working in the field of hybrid arts/practices.

The 5th edition of Little Islands Festival will take place for 4-6 days between mid-July and mid-August of 2023. The exact dates will be announced in mid-April at the latest. The Residency Program will be held between June and July.