On Wednesday 23 July 2025, Professor Dimitris Papanikolaou co-convened in Athens the colloquium “Fearless Festivals”, one of the biggest and most prestigious arts festivals in Greece. "Fearless Festivals" brought together directors of historically renowned European festivals alongside prominent voices from Greece’s theatre and dance communities. The event aimed to “explore the notion of festivals as complex cultural institutions—that must ceaselessly navigate the delicate balance between continuity and change, all the while fostering cross-border collaboration and artistic mobility”.
The colloquium also marked the culmination of Papanikolaou’s two-year stint as a convener of public programmes with the Athens Epidaurus Festival, the biggest and most prestigious arts festival in Greece. In both the 2024 and the 2025 editions, Papanikolaou organised a series of roundtables where performance artists opened a dialogue with authors, critics, activists and public figures on different topics ranging from “Archives and Citizenship” and “Performances of Citizenship”, to “Algorithmic Realism” and “The public politics of Mourning”.
Papanikolaou says: “This was by far one of the most intense and fruitful collaborations of my career. Each year the Festival director and her team shared their line-up early on, and we tried to explore together the central ideas coming out of the programme’s performances, testing them against contemporary debates in critical and cultural theory. The aim was not to create “post-performance” roundtables, but to organise self-standing events where the difference in the way artists, theorists, theorists and scientists approached topical debates would both be underlined and superseded. What I could not foresee was the intensity of the response we received from the public. We spoke on difficult subjects, in full auditoria, with audiences braving the Athens heatwaves to assemble and participate in conversations that were both challenging and extremely open-ended. The whole experience gave me invaluable lessons on how to communicate complex ideas across disciplines and artistic practices, how performance reframes and tests in unexpected ways our critical theory vocabularies, the value of social media in contemporary debate, as well as the immense longing there still is for physical assembly, democratic conversation and for cultural interventions that aim to become acts of citizenship”.
