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Ecopolis is a 3-day anti-commercial festival with no sponsors. All events will be free. This year’s festival schedule is as follows (more info soon):
25/07 – Talks, presentations, and discussions
26/07 – Art exhibitions and performances
27/07 – Concert
Donations help us maintain the festival’s independent and self-funded character, so they are more than welcome.
The city as the main field of social activity and action reflects the wider social environment. Ecopolis festival aims to reveal, challenge, and renegotiate the social tensions of everyday life in the streets, squares and benches of Nicosia. A city that is drowning in coffee shops, street-side tables and fashionable bars. The old city of Nicosia has changed face: from sub-developed historical center it has now fulfilled its potential as an ideal city-commodity, maintaining the advertisable image of the “last divided capital”, while the accelerated gentrification of the last years has constituted it as an urban jewel “clean” from social relations and situations that oppose commodity relations mediated by spectacle.
Skyscrapers for high-class apartments and businesses, pedestrian zones occupied by the tables of countless interchangeable shops, the lack of public benches, fences around Faneromeni church that get taller every year, sidewalks full of parked cars, sky-rocketing rents that become prohibitive for migrant residents –all a result of gentrification and the consumerist influx which followed, creating a city where the only acceptable social / political activity is consumption. Meanwhile, barbed wire, barrels and armies force us us to live our geographical and historic site as half, mediated by the symbols of hatred and tedious queues at the checkpoints to walk a distance of 100 meters.
For us, these are factors composing a challenging landscape of action, in which we intervene creatively by expressing and making proposals for societies organized outside hierarchical, capitalist and sexist mentalities and institutions, on the basis of self-organization, solidarity and companionship. The Ecopolis festival is being held this year for the first time by the Ecopolis working group on ecology and the city. Ecopolis festival aims to put forth the claim to the city as a Common, as a field of resistance to the social and environmental endeavors of neoliberalism. We want to create the conditions in which the city is experienced as a point of reference and socialization, action and experimentation, rather than as a polished real estate commodity bought and sold according to the laws of the market and current trends.
Short-statement on the gathering of Beyond Europe – Antiauthoritarian Platform Against Capitalism in Nicosia (Cyprus) from the second to the fourth of March 2018
Last weekend antiauthoritarian groups from all over Europe came together in the divided town of Nicosia on the Island of Cyprus, located in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea. Some of us hadn’t seen each other since the riotous nights of the G20 summit in Hamburg in July of last year, while many met for the first time. In 2013, when the platform Beyond Europe was formed, we were riding a wave of emancipatory unrest all over Europe, the United States of America and Northern Africa. This unrest was reacting to the economic crisis of 2008 and how it was handled politically. Today we are facing a different beast. It has risen out of the crackdown of this wave of unrest by the cooperation of neoliberal and authoritarian regimes. What we find as a result of the normalisation of the crisis through the policing of the social and militarization of the police-force is this: A massive resurgence of nationalism and populism in their many intersections with the various guises of authoritarianism and patriarchy. Going back to the recipes of the past, their promise is the promise of an easy solution. Politicians of all colors keep telling us that what separates us are the irreconcilable ‘natures’ of our ethnicities, nationalities, identity cards and genders, of our belonging. But if three days of discussions with fifty people from five countries and eleven cities has proven one thing, it is that this is a lie.
Under global capitalism, more connects us than it separates us. The culturalisation and naturalisation of bourgeois politics and capitalist economy does not solve one single contradiction arising from them. It simply displaces and externalises them. In this way it hinders progressive politics. Its discursive and material prominence is a danger for the safety and livelihood of everything different. The changed situation thus demands of us to take critical stock of our previous attempts. We are still few, weak and isolated. Our own reproduction often depends on the system and the mechanisms we seek to overcome. And we struggle to make our different histories as movements and the circumstances under which they were formed productive. But in a world divided by borders and classes, brutalized and depraved, we are far more surprised by how much common ground there is among us – how similar our desires for a different world are, and how careful we sometimes can be with each other. In several working groups this weekend – on labour and digitalisation, eco-social-struggles, feminist politics, the authoritarian formation and the rise of new fascisms – it became clear that our answer cannot be retreating into a position of self-defense. Even though they were won only by and after hard-fought battles of social movements, liberal rights or the social-democratic welfare state would not be able to counter Nationalism and Capitals even if they were tenable in the current situation. Nationalism and Capitalism are implicated in liberalism and social democracy, managing their on-going proceedings and enacting their exclusions. Instead, we need to expand and proliferate our struggles over the collective self-organisation of our lives: In the household and the neighborhood, the factory, the call-center, cyberspace, on the school-yard or the lecture hall, the fruit plantation, the coal mine or the hospital. The social and democratic experiment of Rojava, erected and defended admit the horrors of the Syrian war, surely is one example. The movement of #blacklivesmatter is another.
Together we will have to figure out what is to be done with so many issues and only very limited resources on our hands. This will take some time and we warmly invite you to join the discussion. This much is clear: It is only together that we can overcome the obstacles erected between us and the construction of a better life – be it the exploitation of our work, of our life or of our environment for the sake of profit and power. Whatever its form, Capitalism will continue to produce misery, surplus populations, war and the destruction of the Earth. So antiauthoritarian politics will have to change, but our goal remains the same: To move beyond state, nation and capital, be it in their national or supernational European incarnations. We won’t accept anything less. – Beyond Europe, Nicosia, 4.3.2018.
On this 8th of March, Beyond Europe takes an antiauthoritarian, anti-capitalist and anti-nationalist stance in the feminist struggles. This means that we are moving beyond traditional borders and radicalizing hegemonic narratives. The traditional approaches that link patriarchy either only to the state or capitalism need to be overridden so that they can be considered antiauthoritarian.
By drawing attention to the facts that patriarchy is the oldest system of oppression but also has the ability to move beyond borders and norms, we call upon its authoritarian structure.
Let’s fight authority on all its levels: from the local to the transnational. Join us in solidarity by supporting your local groups which strive for feminist demands.
We, as Beyond Europe, gathered today outside the Archibishop´s Palace in solidarity of feminist struggles. Particularly, we aim to support the demands for reproductive justice in Cyprus, since abortion is still illegal. There are currently initiatives for decriminalizing abortion in the law and Church of Cyprus is one of the forces who are actively against abortion as well as other political and wider eco-social struggles.
Here you can find the petition that gathers signatures for supporting the decriminalization of abortion in Cyprus: https://secure.avaaz.org/el/petition/Kypriaki_Voyli_Proothisi_tis_protasis_nomoy_gia_tis_ektroseis/?fLcxxab
Here’s the link for the initiative: fb.me/abortionscy
MY BODY – MY CHOICE! OUR RIOT – OUR VOICE!
One Radical Planet