Diary 2016: Multilingual Thessaloniki: reading walls, building bridges
On almost every wall of the city, on every bench and bus stop there are messages left, transmitting joy and sorrow, anger and frustration. They all cry out to people who walk by I m here”. Here I am but not only, jam këtu, isinom akate, asam tuka. Bilingual citizens of Thessaloniki leave messages in their first language, about love, football and revolution, while others choose to express themselves in languages which become theirs on the spot. What do they wish to share with us?
The 2016 annual calendar of Polydromo leans towards the walls of the city and lets them whisper the wishes and the agony of the bilingual. By collecting and translating their messages we wish to bring you closer to those people’s thinking, a step closer to the multilingual face of the city.
Every month is a message, a written and a spoken one. Some explain the reasons why we all happen to live in Thessaloniki (or we would like to). Most of them come from interviews taken for the project “Multilingual Thessaloniki: Voices of divercity”. Two of the messages come from the MATH.E.ME program (January-August), while another two were written to accompany the pictures (April-September). The pictures you will “read” are only 12 out of the hundreds taken during the last year in many neighborhoods of the city. All of them will be presented, together with the interviews and activities of the multilingual communities of Thessaloniki.
We love everything that expands our cultural and lingual horizons, therefore we wish people living amongst us to keep on expressing themselves in their first language, verbally or not. While to the rest we wish to continue getting rich from the linguistic stimuli around us
Diary 2015: The languages of “I love you”
The fifth annual diary of 'Polydromo' group for 2015 is titled 'The languages of I love you' and is dedicated to the family. If the family is the home that makes us feel free (as the drawing below suggests), then it is also the place where all the elements of our identity are entitled to a place, so that their synthesis can emancipate and strengthen us wherever we may be. We set out on the premise that the family is the place where we can celebrate our uniqueness, both as individuals and as a unit.
This is why we asked families to describe their own linguistic and cultural uniqueness, to open a window to their lives for us and share something that has special importance to them. The twelve months travel us through different synergies of languages, cultures, interpersonal and diasporic stories. The families narrate their routes starting, merging, branching, separating, changing. At the same time, they negotiate their 'common' language, combining and/or constructing their own communication codes. Undoubtedly, each one of these hybridic bi/multilingual families leaves their own footprint in the 'family' concept.
Diary 2014: Games around the world
We choose the topic of "Games around the world" in our fourth annual diary. Games drive us to different countries and cultures, creating a common code of communication. Having started out in the Tower of the Faculty of Education of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 'Polydromo' returns there and gives life to the games in a Faculty where learning turns into fun, learning and creation. The photos taken during this event decorate the pages of our diary and provide the content of the first exposition titled “Games in the Tower”. Ιf you are at Thessaloniki, you are invited to visit POLY.ST.EK.I. and enjoy the snapshots of this mini project.
We suggest that you keep the pages of every month where the games are described and play with your friends and family, inside and beyond the classrooms!
Every game does stand up as the mean of interaction and communication, the "words" and "images" are just the motivation. Let's play! .
