Nicosia festival in its biggest iteration yet

The Let’s Go Kaimakli (Pame Kaimakli in Greek) Festival celebrates its 10^th anniversary this year with a rich programme. A total of 28 artists, performers, musicians, writers, and economists are part of the festival on Saturday, offering free events and activities that will spread all throughout old Kaimakli.

All evening long, numerous streets of old Kaimakli will fill with colour, music and screenings as the events unfold.

The theme this year aims to revive distant memories and shed light on the emergence of new worlds, new realities, acknowledging and building relationships, while putting familiar public, private and intermediate spaces and conditions under a new light. As always, the festival’s events will include marginalised social groups living in the area, involving the elderly and immigrants in their actions.

“With inclusivity as its goal,” say organisers, “Pame Kaimakli 2023 negotiates concepts of collective memory, multiple readings of place and experiences, creating a platform for the recognition of space. Maintaining its open and participatory character, it aims this year to create a framework for artistic events, works, narratives, and installations that reshape history by connecting memories with people and places, while simultaneously reframing the local within the global. The new stories presented within the framework of the festival aim to overturn separations and exclusions, shedding new light on time and place.”

From 5.30pm onwards, festival-goers will be able to watch open-air film and documentary screenings, attend artist talks, herbal children’s workshops, installations and group performances by a number of artists, theatrical walks and shadow theatre. Also part of the 2023 agenda is a painting rooftop event on two buildings across the Green Line as well as a pop-up cinema experience and a video archive showing interviews with Glyn Hughes. A detailed programme of events is shared on the official Pame Kaimakli Facebook page.

A community stencil art workshop will take place on Friday, led by artist TwentyThree, engaging youth and promoting social and environmental sustainability. Led by the local street artist, participants aged 16 and over will meet at Ayia Varvara square in Kaimakli for a two-hour interactive workshop starting at 6pm. A specially designed map will guide visitors to the festival locations as the whole of old Kaimakli will be activated through participatory art events. The time to go to Kaimakli is now!

Let’s Go Kaimakli

Arts festival with interactive workshops, walks, tours and urban installations. Organized by Urban Gorillas. September 23. Kaimakli neighbourhood, Nicosia. 5.30pm-11pm. Free. www.urbangorillas.org