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The paper contextualizes and reflects on the essay-films John and the Street (1967) and Acropolis (2001) by prominent Greek filmmakers Tonia Marketaki (1942--1994) and Eva Stefani (b. 1964), respectively. Created at different moments in modern Greek history, the two films nonetheless address the tension between history and personal experience in the public sphere, especially as this tension marks the urban context of Athens. The analysis explores how the two films challenge hegemonic national narratives while tracing "subterranean" alternative subjectivities. It emphasizes the aesthetic practices developed by the filmmakers and examines whether these practices contribute to what Jacques Rancière has described as a possible reconfiguration of "the distribution of the sensible," and whether they help to envision urban reality as a spatio-temporal field of ever emergent potentialities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socially engaged art projects that give central priorities to principles of participation, collaboration and the inclusion of various social groups into the creative process are spreading rapidly. Despite this "social turn" in contemporary art (or maybe it is because of it) one of the most important questions remains: how do we evaluate such activ ity? Socially engaged art radically transgresses the lim its of artistic autonomy that were inherent to modernism, transferring the processes of creativity from the conventional art-world space into the sphere of social relations. Thus, an art practice which is not merely representational directly affects human relations. Therefore evaluation of social art can be diverse including various combinations of aesthetic, ethical and political aspects. The paper investigates the problems of evaluating social art in order to formulate a set of criteria that will be applied in the analysis of the Šančiai-Friendly Zone socially engaged art project. The theoretical part of the paper ends with the conclusion that different dimensions of political, ethical and aesthetic standpoints should be judged in proportion to one another as they impact the general form that the particular socially engaged art project takes. Ethical criteria are the most problematic ones when applied to the creative processes that are impossible to put in the frame of tight moral boundaries. Political meaning and effects in socially engaged art projects are obvious and interpretation should be based on the principles of locality and contextuality. However, the question of aesthetic values in socially engaged art are often forgotten in order to understand the broader political possibilities and limits of social art. Raising the question of aesthetic criteria, as I've argued, should thus be one of the essential things to do. On the one hand the transposition of art related skills to the non-art sphere exactly defines the limits of social art detaching it from such disciplines as social work or activism. On the other hand the transfer of attributes of art discourse, the condensation of the unknown and the imaginary, into the sphere of social relations can accomplish the act which historically is associated with socially engaged art's raison d'être - to change reality. The second part of the article contains the analysis of artistic and cultural project Šančiai - Friendly Zone executed in 2013 in Kaunas. The main aim of the project was to create experiences of publicness through communication and collaboration with local communities in one area of Kaunas called Žemieji Šančiai. The publicity in this case was perceived after Jürgen Habermas' classic definition of the modern "public sphere" understood as a place for critical-rational discussion. However, the project bears all the consequences that follow from this idealist image of public sphere. From a social point of view Žemieji Šančiai is a very heterogeneous area beginning from working class foundation ending with large Roma minority. In a context such as this the urgent question to be raised is how to overcome Habermasian idealism where the interests of one class are regarded as universal, ignoring the heterogeneity of the public sphere by blindly believing in the efficiency of rational communication? After the analysis of the Šančiai - Friendly Zone project the statement could be made that the participants overcame the normative rationality of public space by using creative methods based on creativity and imagination instead of logical argumentation. They provoked the emergence of collective images, emotions, and acts; creating situations in the local community in order to form new derivatives of the public sphere even if they were temporary and fragmentary. However, the analysis tells how important it's to note that the public sphere, just as society, is not homogeneous, and how stressing the differences and conflicts that follow from this situation are important. The tools of art and creativity can expose and employ the conflicts productively. So far, the inner conflict situation seems to have been extracted from the agenda of project Šančiai-Friendly Zone (the title Friendly Zone speaks for itself) and concentrated on external conflict (where enemy is official conception of culture and negligence of institutions). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating the possibilities of the conceptualization of media policy within cultural policy, this paper focuses on the controversies between the necessary de-etatisation of the media system and the wish of cultural policy to use it as a mediator of cultural values and art achievements. The research raises the following questions: How should cultural policy address media issues? How were diversity policies formulated within and through the civil sector - and how did the public sector answered? And to what extent are those issues elaborated within the process of the harmonization of accession countries and the countries of the Western Balkan region (making necessary efforts to join public policies standards of EU countries). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]