The first Voicings call was answered by singers, actors and background actors, choreographers, directors, visual artists, museum curators, theatrologists, producers, as well as dance, vocal and animation teachers, museum educators, and drama school students from Athens, Thessaloniki, Corfu and Trikala, representing the characteristic diversity of our sector. We thank you.
Your stories prove, once again, that the way the Ministry of Culture and the State has treated workers in the arts and culture sector was either extremely limited or alarmingly uninformed and therefore unable to meet the real emergencies of the current crisis. They describe how difficult it is to cope with the continual suspensions of productions and courses - even with the desperately meagre state allowance (for those who manage to receive it) - and also with the almost non-existent technological support for the transfer of art education to the internet.
At the same time, acknowledging that the pandemic has highlighted problems faced by the arts community for decades, your testimonies directly call on the Greek government to seriously strengthen culture - instead of reinforcing forms of police repression, for example - with systematic funding, cultural policy that does not not deal with the arts purely in commercial terms, solidarity, support of artistic research, employment of artists in similar fields in the educational sector, as well as the creation of state structures that will operate with transparent procedures and provide fair working conditions for artists.
Εvery two days we published on the SAW page one of the testimonies we received. In this way, we want to recognise the value of the potentially uncomfortable but also generous move to expose your personal difficulties in public, giving space to each individual Voice to be heard as clearly as possible. We also notified the Ministries of Culture, Labour and Finance about all our posts.
