“Towards a practical philosophy of collectively improvised space” Danae Stefanou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) dstefano@mus.auth.gr Athens, May 2011. Thousands of peaceful protestors are gathering up outside the Greek parliament in Syntagma, the city’s largest and most emblematic square; it is a collective movement that seems to have sprung up quite spontaneously, in an effort to oppose government plans for further austerity measures. Practically overnight, the square becomes densely populated with makeshift tents. Within a couple of days, the assembled groups are meticulously organized to handle everything from health and legal aid to cultural and artistic activities. This kind of collectivity, still active as we speak, becomes portrayed in the press as a veritable cross-section of Greek society; people of different ages, ideologies, educational and cultural backgrounds are persistently taking to the streets. The movement’s motto, “keep calm and take the square” and its main identifiers, a site, blog and various social media accounts bundled under the name “real democracy.gr”, all centre around the rhetoric of a spontaneous, real-time democratic gathering. At the same time, another, much smaller and more specialized kind of democratic collective is convening, on a less central, less symbolic quarter of the city centre. Musicians and non-musicians are gathering to improvise together, as they have been doing every Sunday for the past few years. They are following no rules but the ones they make up on the spot, and after each set, they are exchanging individual opinions as to whether these rules help or hinder the music they just made. They do so not in an attempt to perfect a singular outcome, nor are they trying to reach some sort of objective, reified aesthetic conclusion as to the style and quality of “the music itself”. In fact not everyone will come back next Sunday, not everyone has attended this gathering before, and every week there is bound to be a variation in the number and identity of the participants. This is not a rehearsal for something; the participants are not an ensemble. What is happening is a free improvisation workshop, comparable to