MENTOR in Culture is an independent cultural management company with a strong track record in applied research, strategic content development, and participatory methodologies. The company is specialized in the intersection of cultural heritage, sustainability, social resilience, and digital transformation in the cultural sector.

Combining interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approaches with field- based implementation, MENTOR serves as a bridge between the academic and research community, local societies and marginalized or vulnerable social groups, as well as the cultural and creative industries.

MENTOR’s team consists of experts in cultural management, museology, social research, digital humanities, and strategic communication, working collaboratively to design interventions with institutional, social, and cultural impact.

MENTOR develops tools, methods, and frameworks that connect European policies to local dynamics, transforming cultural realities into shared and inclusive futures. MENTOR’s methodology is rooted in the principles of Agenda 21 for Culture and is constantly evolving to address the real needs of communities, offering solutions to critical societal challenges while empowering cultural ecosystems.

Originating from Greece’s startup ecosystem, MENTOR in Culture has evolved into a specialized actor in the cultural field, enabling partnerships and initiatives at both national and international levels across the European cultural landscape.

The mission of the “Athena” Research Center is to conduct outstanding research in Informatics and Computational Sciences, tackling global challenges and local needs, and producing technological results with impact on other sciences, industry, and the society at large.

For more than 25 years, the “Athena” RC sustains a culture of innovation, developing high-end technologies, products and services, and cultivating synergies between the entrepreneurial and research worlds. It has founded 5 spin-off companies and facilitates three industrial clusters in knowledge-intensive thematic sectors.

The vision of the “Athena” RC is to create knowledge and devise solutions and technologies for the digital society. It aims to serve the full spectrum of the research lifecycle, starting from basic and applied research, continuing to system & product building and infrastructure service provision, and ending with technology transfer and entrepreneurship.

The scope of activities of the “Athena” RC includes all Information and Communication Technologies, covering all software and hardware aspects. These include every area of informatics, data science, robotics, automation, signal processing, artificial intelligence, networking and digital communication, and modelling. Computational sciences form a strong component of the “Athena” RC activities, including –but without being limited to– computational linguistics, archaeology, engineering, medicine, biology, biodiversity, earth observation, space science, mechanics, and the arts.

The key value of the “Athena” RC lies in the deep expertise and extensive experience of its more than 350 researchers and other professionals. By participating in more than 300 R&D projects in the last five years and producing more than a thousand publications in the same time frame, the people of the “Athena” RC are the ones giving it its strong international reputation.

The team representing the “Athena” Research Center was responsible for transferring digital know-how to the project, as the team’s researchers had participated in various projects designing and developing online applications related to tangible and intangible cultural heritage and artistic creation.

The team had completed the design, development, and evaluation of innovative initiatives that offered experiences adopting new technologies in the field of culture, through projects such as Emotive (Storytelling for Cultural Heritage) and WhoLoDancE (Whole-body Interaction Learning for Dance Education). Its long-standing research on the semantic and computational analysis of the human factor and emotional reactions made the “Athena” Research Center team well suited for the development and evaluation of projects aiming at emotional audience engagement, active participation, and embodied experiences.

Within the first phase of Transition to 8, the team developed an accessible online platform to support interdisciplinary research focusing on sociodrama and contemporary artistic creation, with emphasis on electronic music and digital arts, and built the infrastructure needed for the online presentation of data related to the social issues of the Eleusis region. With the platform’s intended use in mind, the team, in collaboration with the project’s partners, created a methodology for sharing data with artists and strengthening the connection between artistic creation and raising awareness of major social issues affecting communities in Greece and Europe. To achieve this, the “Athena” team worked on designing and developing innovative technologies that connected the social issues of a specific area and people’s reactions to them with electronic music and digital art.

The work began by recording the preferences of electronic music producers and DJs and mapping the requirements that needed to be met by the research and scientific institutions for the development of both the sociodrama methodology and the software behind the digital platform.

The scientific team of the Laboratory of Qualitative Research in Psychology and Psychosocial Well-Being of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens was in charge of researching and highlighting the topics that affected the residents of Eleusis on a psychosocial level. Their role also included conducting the sociodrama sessions and collecting and analysing the data.

The psychologists began by mapping the social phenomena of Eleusis and sought to reflect on the meaning of terms such as “Eleusis-life,” citizenship, cooperation, social issues, and daily life. Social matters affecting residents’ everyday lives included environmental pollution, employment and unemployment, the refugee/immigrant situation, and visible residential parameters in the area (landscape industrialisation, changes to the urban environment, etc.).

The team developed an approach to map these social matters based on their intensity and worked to determine how they affected the daily lives of Eleusis’s residents psychosocially (socially, culturally, environmentally, and scientifically). The material gathered made the three thematic categories concrete and set the framework for the sociodrama sessions carried out in the city in September 2021.

The team analysed the sociodrama sessions using qualitative analysis methods (verbal and non-verbal evaluation) and, in collaboration with the “Athena” Research Center, through physiological recordings measurement (radial pulse, heart rhythm, skin conductivity, etc.). Using the collected data, the “Athena” Research Center team proceeded with implementing the digital platform, where artists could access and extract material to produce original artworks.

Participants in the sociodrama sessions gained a deeper understanding of concepts such as social behaviour, stereotypes, social phenomena and problems, and experientially explored different ways of thinking, including the perspective of the “Other”, in relation to themselves and to the diverse viewpoints represented by other participants. They also benefited from increased empathy, since the sociodrama process required participants to “play” different roles, fostering a deeper awareness of the themes explored.

The overall aim was to activate healthy elements of communication within each group and support teams in addressing the issues that emerged. As mental health professionals, the team focused on promoting wellbeing and supporting shifts in thinking and psychological stance. Eleusis, at the intersection of multiple routes (commercial, historical, synchronic and diachronic), was approached as a representative case that could reflect similar challenges faced by other locations and cities in Greece and abroad.