Demitrios Kargotis
Course Leader: MA Art and Design Interdisciplinary Practices
Birmingham School of Art
- Email:
- demitrios.kargotis@bcu.ac.uk
- Phone:
- +44(0)121 300 5975
Demitrios Kargotis works as part of the design action group Dash n’ Dem. Since 2010, their wide-ranging participatory projects centre on popular education and critical and creative citizenship participation. The open-ended, collaborative structure of their practice explores how co-creation can act as a form of activism that empowers different audiences to confront and reimagine reality.
Dash n’ Dem make work that aims to make politics more assessable and engaging. For instance, providing a group of teenagers at the South London Gallery with a David Cameron lookalike to take over and create their own party political broadcast in the run up to the 2015 UK general election. Or, revisiting an 80’s post-punk compilation cassette Dump it on Parliament produced in opposition to a proposed nuclear waste dump in Bedfordshire, inviting emerging bands today to develop cover versions and write new songs of protest.
Demitrios is also a founding member of Post Workers Theatre (PWT), a collective of designers and artists who produce projects that consider what politically engaged performance could be, utilising democratic forms of production to co-author creative outcomes with a variety of community and educational groups. Their creative goal is to reconsider the history and function of worker’s theatre of the past, and the current conditions for workers today through political, technological and social lenses. The aim is produce projects that can highlight future facing issues of social equality and alternative ways to discuss important issues.