Sickle & Code is an international exhibition, part of Phygital, a programme conceptualised for Cyprus by Dr. Chrystalleni Loizidou within the scope of investigating contemporary movements towards a knowledge-sharing economy that reconsiders capitalist definitions of credit, labour and production. Phygital is currently implemented in Tzoumerka (Greece), Tirana (Albania) and Nicosia (Cyprus), involving the development of makerspaces with a focus on free and open source software driven by local communities.

As a title, Sickle & Code suggests a combination of tools: the sickle, an agricultural tool and once a resonant symbol of social revolutions; and the code, the language we develop as a tool in software programming. In contemporary debates coding links through movements, such as that of ‘free and open-source software’, with the demand, on a practical level, for open collaboration and unhindered re(distribution) of technologies and, on a theoretical level, with the social claim for freedom in access and in processes of making. Although the two tools reference distinct spheres of activity (the physical and the digital), they are both designed in order to shape the world we live in. As such, Sickle & Code drives us to the core of the wider Phygital project, which builds on practices that move between the material and the digital, melding older forms of making and co-producing with current methods of fabrication and contemporary notions on the communal, collective and collaborative. Cypriot and international artists present works that reflect, confront and re-evaluate current models of producing under the conjunction of global digital commons of knowledge.

Curatorial team: Peter Eramian, Elena Parpa, Evanthia Tselika