AveloSpace is a makerspace located in downtown Athens, Greece, a creative space for research, music and art, for experimenting and making things. We began working on our space collectively in 2017, cleaning out cobwebs, re-plastering walls, laying new electrics, plumbing and painting. Since 2017 we have slowly begun to form as a collective, working together on different projects and workshops, holding meetings, learning Greek, playing music and games and hanging out. Our space includes a small feminist/LGBTQIA+/ critical race library, screening area, sound studios, painting and stenciling workshop and a kitchen.

At AveloSpace we make experiences & experiment with critical social forms to find sustainable ways to bring us together and keep us alive. We’re busy here making a shared imaginary that we work to make ‘real’. We are a non-competitive, collective, creative platform, in both an analogue and digital sense. We reconsider and critique ideas of value through our production and search for better processes to redistribute the resources needed to sustain queer creative living.

As a queer-feminist radical collective our guiding principles align with criticality, solidarity and struggle in collective work. We are an activist project founded upon collective processes that intervene in socionormative structures for the creation of alternative social spaces and relations: anti-capitalist, non-hierarchical, queerfeminist, antiracist, no prisons, no borders.

The backgrounds of our collective are varied, we have different skills and bring a wide range of experiences to our working commitments together. We are activists, artists, academics, students, cooks, hairdressers, teachers, graphic designers, law graduates, translators and journalists. Between us we speak nine languages, Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Greek and English. We have expertise in International and European protections of human rights, sociocultural studies of migration and gender, social policy, queer-feminist & anti-racist cultures, critical pedagogies, theater studies and LGBTQIA+ refugees and EU law.

But all this was before the pandemic. And now, now we are in a state of flux…