Our mission is to make the arts more accessible, fun and affordable for everyday people, delivering high quality artistic content to all, wherever they are and whatever they are doing. We aim to achieve this by establishing permanent stores on high streets where an original taste of whatever is happening around London may be experienced, condensed in time and space of course.
This has worked wonders in crisis-striken Athens, and we intend to make it happen in London too, where people don't have the time (or the money) or even don't know what to choose among the vast gamut of artistic events our great city has to offer.
Our stores will be established on conventional store spaces on high streets, which will be turned into small performance/exhibition spots operating around the day and delivering dense fixes of all artistic content (music, theatre, dance, painting etc.) to anybody who walks in. The program changes every day, there is something new to see every 15 minutes!
What we'll deliver:
- Take a dilapidated ex adult shop in the heart of Soho and turn it into a performance/exhibition space.
Why it's a great idea:
By creating this space, artFix allows the creative industry and the general public to meet in a new context and supports the sustainability of cultural organisations and the development of emerging artists. Our initial target audience is composed of tourists and culturally engaged Londoners, for whom we aim to be a taster device of London’s cultural scene at any given day. With this audience in mind, artFix will present a mix of well-known and lesser known, and of typical and peculiar artistic content, as if combining Time Out London and the Londonist in a physical space.
In an artFix space, the physical meets the digital, the classical meets the contemporary, the exhibition meets the performance, all right there on the high street.
Steps to get it done:
- Finally, we will establish a small coffee shop in the store for people to enjoy coffee and art together
- Then we will buy and fit all equipment necessary to turn the place into a performance and exhibition area
- We are putting in a lot of work to change the ex-adult store to an art's space!
The concept for artFix originated in Athens, Greece, in 2012 with our venture Vryssaki: a social enterprise consisting of a gallery and performance space. Vryssaki’s aim has been to encourage participation in the arts in the local community and has proved financially successful by becoming profitable in its first year. The space has had a particularly positive impact on infrequent consumers of the arts, who have felt stimulated by Vryssaki to enjoy the arts more regularly, and has, as such, been a welcome addition to Athens’ cultural scene.
Vryssaki has been working with some of the most established cultural organisations in Greece, such as the National Theatre and the University of Fine Arts, as well as with hundreds of visual and performance artists.Vryssaki additionally organises workshops directed at engaging local audiences with artists and these partner organisations, and more than 500 people participate in them monthly.
