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“Transition To 8: European societies in flux” (TT8) is an innovative project merging social sciences, technology, and contemporary art to raise awareness about the impact of air pollution on European communities. Through participatory activities like bodystorming and sociodrama, communities’ biometric and emotional responses are recorded, to understand how communities react to social issues, such as air pollution.
The collected data are analysed by computer and social scientists; then they are integrated into digital moodboards in the form of: raw data, visual material, text, graphs, sonifications and visualisations. Those digital moodboards will be given to artists to integrate data into creating original artworks.
Supported by the Creative Europe programme, the project will run until October 2026 across cities like Eleusis (Mentor / Greece), Rennes (Electroni[k] / France), Ljubljana (MoTA / Slovenia), with exhibitions and performances taking place in all locations and at major festivals such as SONICA in Slovenia and Maintenant in France, with the final showcase being in Yerevan (TAI / Armenia).
Sociodrama is both a methodology and a philosophy, born from the pioneering work of psychiatrist J. L. Moreno in the early 20th century. With studies in medicine, philosophy, and mathematics, Moreno rejected Freud’s approach, which focused on the isolated individual within the therapeutic room. Instead, he placed the human being within society as an organic part of a larger whole. For him, it was the group itself that offered the greatest possibilities for growth, healing, and transformation.
While psychodrama, also developed by Moreno, focuses on the individual within the group, sociodrama elevates the group itself as the “protagonist”. It is the collective body that speaks, acts, and reflects. Through this process, participants explore not only their own perspectives but also the networks of relationships, roles, and social systems that shape collective life.
Sociodrama is a group experiential process that allows participants to embody roles, test new behaviours, and examine social interactions beyond the surface of everyday life. It addresses issues such as prejudice, stigma, social justice, intergroup conflict, trauma, and identity. At its core, it cultivates both spontaneity and creativity, two concepts that Moreno regarded as fundamental for individual and collective wellbeing.
This methodology pays attention not only to spoken words but also to the entire spectrum of non-verbal communication: facial expressions, gestures, body posture, movement, tone of voice, even silence. Through role-playing within a “place–action–motivation” framework, participants experiment with different ways of being. The aim is not to resolve conflicts definitively but to release healthy elements within the group, cultivating deeper awareness, empathy, and the capacity for change.
A typical sociodrama session unfolds in stages: the warm-up, where participants collectively define the topic, the casting of roles, the development of characters, and finally, the reflective discussion. In this last phase, participants analyse what emerged during the enactment, discover unexpected connections, and articulate possible perspectives or solutions.
For decades, Eleusis has carried the weight of its industrial past. Heavy industry, oil refineries, cement factories, and shipyards transformed the city, providing employment and local economic growth, but also leaving deep scars on the environment and the collective memory. Despite improvements in recent years in the quality of air and water, air pollution continues to cast a shadow over residents’ daily lives. The ever-burning flame of the Hellenic Petroleum refineries and the massive installations in Aspropyrgos serve as constant reminders of the fragile balance between production and human wellbeing. The industrial smell that often spreads across the city affects not only the body but also quality of life, cultivating feelings of insecurity, fatigue, and resignation.
The industrial legacy of the city is not only an environmental issue but also a social and cultural one. It shapes how residents perceive their city, their relationships, their sense of belonging. It influences family histories, everyday practices, and the symbolic landscape of Eleusis, where ancient heritage coexists with industrial shells. At the same time, the community continues to demand boundaries for industrial activity, the protection of the natural environment, and the reclaiming of public space, especially the coastal front, as a right rather than a privilege.
Within this framework, the artistic project Transition to 8 chose sociodrama as a method for collective reflection and dialogue. Sociodrama creates a space where citizens can confront these realities together, not only through rational discussion but also through creative role-play that brings to the surface hidden tensions, attitudes, beliefs, and unspoken experiences. By embodying roles, neighbours, mythical figures, policymakers, grieving relatives, or even non-human entities such as the sea or lost monuments, participants explore and present perspectives different from their own.
During a sociodrama session, experiences emerge as threads weaving together the community’s reality. The process reveals hidden patterns of interaction, illuminates the emotional weight of life under ongoing environmental pollution, and offers new ways of reimagining collective futures and possibilities. In Eleusis, sociodrama is not merely a therapeutic or artistic exercise; it is a democratic practice of participation, enabling citizens to see themselves not only as individuals affected by pollution but as part of a collective body capable of responding, resisting, and redefining its reality.
Within Transition to 8, sociodrama functioned as an essential tool for participation and collective expression. On Monday, July 7, a session was held in Eleusis, where public participation proved both impressive and deeply moving. The meeting became a safe space where residents could negotiate and reflect upon the multiple dimensions of identity, embodiment, and everyday life in a city continually shaped by the reality of air pollution.
Through discussions, experiential activities, and role-playing, participants gave voice to their concerns and shared the emotional weight of life in Eleusis. The phrase “Heavy landscape, heavy atmosphere over the city” captured the suffocating presence of environmental degradation, while the statement “It saddened me because I realised where we live and how they think of us” highlighted the community’s marginalisation. These words became symbolic anchors of the collective experience, expressing sentiments that are often lived but rarely articulated publicly.
In this context, sociodrama activated collective consciousness and created a space where diverse identities could be expressed on equal terms. By embodying roles and re-enacting situations, participants were able to process both personal and communal experiences simultaneously. Their physical and emotional reactions were recorded both qualitatively and biometrically. These data will later become material for contemporary artistic creation, transforming lived experience into new cultural forms.
What made the Transition to 8 sociodrama sessions successful was the integration of scientific observation within the same process as artistic creation. Alongside discussions and enactments, researchers carefully recorded participants’ bodily reactions, such as body temperature, galvanic skin response, and heart rate, always with their consent. These physiological data, combined with the emotional and verbal material of the sessions, will become a source of inspiration for artists.
This dual approach, combining a group experiential methodology with data-driven artistic production, demonstrates how Transition to 8 creates a dialogue between science, art, and community. It is an experiment in how shared vulnerability and collective imagination can serve as tools for contemporary artistic creation.
The initial outcomes of the sociodrama sessions were encouraging and in many cases exceeded expectations. Participants reported surprise at encountering fellow citizens in such a deeply participatory setting. People who had lived side by side for years suddenly discovered new dimensions in each other’s lives by embodying unfamiliar roles and voicing thoughts that often remain hidden. For some, the sessions provided a much-needed space to express long-held frustrations about pollution, loss, and neglect. For others, they brought relief and recognition, the comfort that their experiences were not isolated but shared.
Above all, the process generated anticipation and curiosity for the next step: the transformation of voices, emotions, and bodily responses into artistic outcomes. This prospect gave participants a sense of continuity, that their words and feelings would not vanish after the session but would continue to resonate, shaping the cultural imprint of the project and feeding back into the collective life of the city.
For the facilitators, the sessions confirmed the power of sociodrama to cultivate social consciousness, participation, and democratic dialogue. By addressing the group as a living organism rather than as a sum of individuals, sociodrama reinforced the sense that the community of Eleusis is bound together by common concerns and hopes. It illuminated the invisible threads that connect personal stories to broader social issues, showing that even the most private emotions form part of a larger social fabric.
As Transition To 8: European societies in flux progresses, the integration of sociodrama with biometric research and artistic creation will continue to broaden the horizons of what artistic projects can achieve. In Eleusis, a city where past and present, myth and industry, community and environment are interwoven in complex ways, sociodrama has offered a new language of dialogue, a language from the community for the community: one in which the community itself becomes both protagonist and creator.
“Transition To 8: European societies in flux” is a project supported by the Creative Europe programme, implemented by MENTOR (Greece), the Museum of Transitory Arts (Slovenia), Electroni[k] (France), and the Today Art Initiative (Armenia), and co-funded by the European Union.