Pame Kaimakli Festival 2022

Pame Kaimakli Festival is an annual community event that aims to explore ideas of publicness, co-creation and community engagement through creative interventions with the collaboration of residents and artists.

This year’s festival took place in Kaimakli, Nicosia between the 4th and the 13th of July 2022 and preparatory workshops throughout the month of June 2022.

This year’s thematic ‘Urban Playground’ was a celebration of play, discovery and human interactions in public spaces.

Urban Playground explores the idea of play in public spaces as a tool for social and spatial interactions, sociability, co-creation and coexistence with the natural environment.

As the current global pandemic persists to transform the way we live, this years’ event highlighted the importance of play in public spaces, not only as a tool to enable human connections but also to create correlations between humans, city and nature.

The event aimed to design playful explorations of the neighbourhood while stressing values of empathy, camaraderie and connection with the local community.

It invited residents and visitors to explore their urban environment through playful tools and interventions and to embrace a new reading of their urban open spaces as our common meeting ground.

The festival entailed 33 activities where community collaboration was essential for their realisation. 2 artistic residencies focused on projects with communities (of both sides of the divided capital). Additionally 2 theatre plays and a kite exhibition-flying event were realised through community workshops.The festival also welcomed the results and exhibitions of two Creative Europe projects, ECRN and A-place.

The festival was funded by:

The Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport and Youth

The Nicosia Municipality

The festival was supported by:

The Japan World Exposition 1970 Commemorative Fund – JEC

Nicosia Tourist Board

Engage Nicosia

the Embassy of Japan in Cyprus

TMS – Thinker Maker Space

Stakeholders that were involved:

Local and international artists ( Netherlands, Lebanon, Japan, Ireland, China,Cyprus), and cultural associations: CSA (Bologna), Loop (Barcelona)

NGOs like the Cyprus Energy Agency and some local artist communities such as: ‘Allospos’, ‘Yiasemin’, ‘Eidekanou Theatre Group’, AnimaFest