14 GROUNDCOVER NEWS INSP JULY 14, 2023 Shediart: The history, process and techniques of Shedia’s upcycling project TONY INGLIS International Network of Street Papers Editor When INSP visited Greek street paper Shedia in Athens, we visited the home of its various social projects, including its long in fruition, and now operating, upcycling project Shediart. Here, former vendors, and otherwise socially marginalised people involved at Shedia, were trained in reconstituting old, unsold Shedia magazines into beautiful, artistic, functional products. In the workshop, as items were being made, one of the people behind the idea, Katrin Kretschmer, explained how it came to be and what was going on. INSP: How was the Shediart concept born? Katrin Kretschmer: There were so many old magazines in storage and no one really knew what to do with them. If you bring them to a recycling plant, you get very little in return for them — maybe around 50 euros — and it is quite a job to transport them. So, while it's the ideal disposal method, it's difficult for us in terms of time and effort. And recycling — okay, it's better than burning them of course, but there's no real benefit for any person (other than the overall environmental aspect), which is what they were printed for in the first place. So we thought, is there an alternative? What else can we do? And I started to try different things, just experimenting using the paper — what could it do? Could you use a tool to turn the paper into a pulp and mold with it? Or perhaps weave it like a textile? I tried different techniques, making some jewellery, and I said, ok it’s possible to produce good and different things out of this paper we use. And when we had nailed down the techniques, we started to have workshops. We invited the Shedia vendors to come to upcycling workshops. They were open — anyone who was interested could come just to see if they took an interest in handicrafts and being creative. But we didn't say anything about creating jobs in the beginning, mainly because we wanted the people who were really interested, and not just those interested in money but also in the art form. No one was excluded. We had a lot of workshops to begin with. Some people said it was a bit difficult — maybe they weren't so dexterous, or their eyes weren't so good. And there were a few people who said they'd like to do it but just didn't find that they were particularly good at it. It’s not the simplest thing to do right away. But if you can do things with your hands, and you really like it, you can learn. Some needed a few months to improve and produce really beautiful things. And some others, from the start, just were talented at it and it was second nature to them. And as we work as a team, we learn from each other, come up with more ideas and learn how to make the techniques better, to make the whole process more efficient and make the end products more beautiful. So it's an ongoing process. INSP: When you make a specific kind of product, is there, for example, a checklist, a set process — how does each piece come together in a practical sense? KK: Our thought from the beginning was we didn't want to create useless stuff. I suppose jewellery could be called useless but people like to have it! But we didn’t initially want to produce art that is stationary, like a sculpture that just sits in your living room. Perhaps we will at some point. For now, our checklist is: Is it useful? Is it beautiful? Is it more or less practical to produce? And do we have someone who can produce it? Because we also have a few ideas, though nobody skilled in doing it yet, that would require proper sewing. There are many things that we could do if we had people who were really qualified. But we have already trained as much as we can at this point. And we need to create an income from the project so that we can bring more people on board. We really want to pay people for their work. We really want to have another work opportunity for those who were former vendors, if possible. It's not easy, and if you want to adopt this, to copy and paste it to other street papers, there may be fluctuations in the difficulty of doing that. We can't say ‘this is how it is,’ but we can show you how we do it, and maybe it will be a fit. If there are only two to four people in a street paper who might be interested or able after some lessons — and for us it really took about two years, we even had lessons about how to host a workshop — it was not that we said we know everything now. We asked for help — how to speak to different age groups, how to run things. We care that we do it properly. The training, for those involved, even for a short time, has such a big impact that it’s worth it. INSP: And in the workshops, how many of the techniques used were planned out and were trial and error? see SHEDIA next page
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