Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Philosophische Fakultät I

Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

Aesthetics of Crisis.

Political Street Art in Athens in the Context of the Crisis.

Masterarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades

Master of Arts (M.A.) im Fach Europäische Ethnologie

eingereicht von Julia Tulke

am 3. September 2013

Erste Gutachterin: Prof. Dr. Regina Römhild

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

1. INTRODUCTION 3

2. METHODOLOGIES 7

2.1. RESEARCHING STREET ART 7

2.2. A VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY 8

2.3. PROCESSING DATA 10

3. THEORETICAL APPROACHES 11

3.1. URBAN SPACE AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY 11

3.2. THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF STREET ART 13

3.3. ON THE CRISIS 15

4. SOME REMARKS ON THE LOCAL CONTEXT 18

4.1. GREECE AS A SITE OF RESEARCH 18

4.2. ATHENS IN THE POST-DICTATORIAL ERA 19

4.3. CRISIS AS A NATIONAL AND URBAN PHENOMENON 22

5. SETTING THE SCENE 28

5.1. STREET ART IN ATHENS 28

5.2. THE INFLUENCE OF THE CRISIS 31

5.3. THE ARTISTS 33

6. AESTHETICS OF CRISIS 38

6.1. CRISIS 38

6.2. EVERYDAY LIFE UNDER CRISIS 40

6.3. PROTEST AESTHETICS AND POLITICS 42

7. CONCLUDING REMARKS AND PROSPECTS 45

WORKS CITED 47

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LIST OF FIGURES

1 Aesthetics of Crisis exhibition in Berlin, Photo: Ana Baumgart 5

2 Map of the photographs I took in Athens 8

3 Memorial of A. Grigoropoulos at Tsavela* 29

4 Two views of the Trilogy 32

5 Welcome to Athens, artwork by WD in Exarcheia 34

6 My Spraycan, Your Molotov, artwork by Noir in Gkazi 36

7 At times even the municipality of Athens emerges as a commissioner

of street art, as in the case of this mural near Omonoia square 37

8 No Euro No Vision, artwork by bleeps in Omonoia 39

9 Paste-up series by Dimitris Taxis in Kerameikos and Exarcheia 41

10 Protest Scene, artwork on Tsavela street in Exarcheia 43

11 Artwork by ScarrOne in Exarcheia 44

12 A typical gasmask character by Sidron and NDA 44

* If not specified otherwise, all photographs were taken by the author in

Athens between January and April 2013.

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1. INTRODUCTION

In the past five years or so, images capturing the visual identity of a new wave of urban

movements around the globe have been flooding traditional and new media. As diverse as

these movements may be – ranging from uprisings of the Arab Spring to the Indignados in

Spain, from Occupy Wall Street to Gezi Park – they share a connection with what is usually

referred to as the crisis, but in fact represents a multitude of intersecting crises. Furthermore

they commonly lack a centralized leadership and employ a range of subversive strategies that

display a deep concern with reclaiming urban space and the right to the city. When going

through the maelstrom of photographic representations that have been circulating in the

internet as well as in newspapers and magazines, one sees people engaged in protest but also

walls covered in paint, providing space for words and images that reflect and process their

struggles and inscribe them into the surface of the city. This has been particularly true for the

images that have documented the development of the economic and socio-political crisis in

Greece since 2008 and the repercussions for its capital Athens. As I have always been

interested in street art as a cultural practice – especially in intersection with political activism

and social movements – seeing dozens of newspaper articles on various aspects of the Greek

crisis illustrated with photographs of street art aroused my curiosity. Beginning to look further

into the street art scene of Athens and its connections with the crisis, I found a variety of

photos, blog posts, and reports – all relatively shallow – and an impressive short documentary

portraying four Athenian artists and their take on the current situation1. Eventually, I decided

to go to Athens myself and explore this phenomenon ethnographically, which constitutes the

basis of the following work.

The objective of this paper is to describe and analyze the ways in which the current situation

of crisis in Greece is mirrored in the street art on the walls on the city of Athens, the

iconographies and discourses which are mobilized therein and how they relate to the rhetoric

disseminated by mass media and mainstream politics. This empirical analysis will also serve

to raise a number of productive theoretical, methodological and ontological questions, the

perhaps most pressing one being how to make sense of the set of phenomena and discourses

that have been described as the crisis in the past five years? Also it has to be explored how

this context of crisis affects knowledge production, research practices and material landscapes

1 The Wake Up Call by Athens-based Blogger and Filmmaker Kostas Kallergis, see www.thewakeupcall.gr

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– in this case particularly the city of Athens. Similarly, the cultural practice of street art has

hardly been approached systematically in either theory or research and in consequence has to

be accommodated accordingly.

The first chapter of this paper will serve to outline and discuss the methodological strategies

that I employed to generate data during my two-month fieldwork in Athens while also

pointing out some of the problematic aspects of the research experience. This will involve a

discussion of the peculiarities of researching the practice of street art, visual ethnography and

photographic archives as research strategies as well as some remarks on the processing and

coding of my data. In the second chapter I will deal with some central theoretical issues, such

as the social production of urban space, the claims to the right to the city and spatial justice,

and the spatial politics of street art. Furthermore the idea of the crisis will be explored as a

complex and manifold discourse and a bundle of empirical effects constituting the context for

my research. Chapter three will then provide the local context, discussing first the curious

character of Greece as a site of research and knowledge production. Next the urban

development of its capital Athens in the post-dictatorial era (1974-) up to the nominal

beginning of the crisis in 2008 will be outlined. Subsequently I will attempt to describe the

contemporary crisis as a national and an urban phenomenon triggering a very distinct material

transformation of the physical landscape of the city. Building on these observations, chapter

four will set the scene for the fieldwork, providing an impression of the contemporary street

art scene and its actors in Athens. This will include a description of the historical traditions of

street art as well as a few remarks on the influence that the crisis has had on it. Chapter six

will eventually propose a reading of aesthetics of crisis found in the streets of Athens,

focusing on three particular aspects – direct engagements with the crisis, the display of

everyday life realities of the crisis, and protest and politics – and their respective iconographic

and discursive representations. The final chapter will offer some concluding remarks and

evaluate the potentialities of extending the research project.

This paper is based on two months of field research conducted in Athens between January and

April of 2013. During this time I lived in the highly politicized neighborhood of Exarcheia

which thus became a focal point for my research. I also spent extensive amounts of time in

other central districts such as Omonoia, Kerameikos, Gkazi, Psirri and Monastiraki. In order

to develop an overview of the city and to assess where the highest densities of graffiti and

street art could be found, I dedicated a good part of my first weeks in Athens to a sort of urban

exploration and immediately started to document photographically what I found on the walls.

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Simultaneously I conducted several informal expert interviews with Greek researchers who

investigate the crisis and its specific manifestations in the city of Athens from

anthropological, sociological as well as architectural perspectives. Even though I already

experienced some coincidental encounters with street artists in this first phase of my research,

my focus was on getting a general overview of the city and its street art scene. It was only in

the second half of my stay that I started approaching artists and frequenting hubs of the local

scene – mainly galleries and graffiti shops – systematically. I got to know more than 15 artists

with whom I interacted in various and often intersecting ways, conducting oral and written

interviews yet also having multiple informal conversations and in three cases accompanying

the making of an artwork.

One important aim of this research project was to make the generated data as transparent and

accessible as possible. Consequently I have made all my photographs available online through

a photo sharing website and have created a website where background information and all of

the interviews are presented2. Beyond that I put together a small exhibition at a Berlin gallery,

juxtaposing 168 selected photographs from the research with excerpts from interviews I

conducted. During the opening and week of the exhibition approximately 100 people came to

see the exhibition and their comments, questions and the many conversations stimulated in

this context have contributed a great deal to the process of writing this paper.

Figure 1 Aesthetics of Crisis exhibition in Berlin, Photo: Ana Baumgart

2 The photographs can be found at www.flickr.com/aestheticsofcrisis, the website at www.aestheticsofcrisis.org.

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In this paper I make use of two terms which are highly contested and in certain ways

problematic: street art and (the) crisis. Both will be framed and discussed critically from

multiple angles within the next chapters, yet I want to take a moment to explain why I

reproduce them despite the slight unease they cause me and probably many other people. In

the case of the crisis, I use the term because it has no alternative in its ubiquity. It has been

used to mobilize discourses about economics, politics, societies, culture and much more on

global, regional, national, and local levels. It has been used for capitalist critique and

nationalist propaganda; by politicians, activists, journalists, scholars, citizens. This usage of

the term crisis points far beyond its origin suggesting nothing less than a new kind of

historical consciousness. Obviously the frame of this paper will only allow me to touch upon

most of these aspects. Yet, I want to acknowledge them in their multitude as the context of my

research – its subject, the landscapes it engaged with as well as the human interactions it

produced. Using the vague buzz word crisis is thus meant to avoid privileging one single

interpretation of what the crisis is, but instead to acknowledge it as a tense site of contesting

ideologies. The case of street art presents an entirely different problem, the existence of too

many alternative terms: urban art, public art, brandalism, urban hacking/inter-

vention/inscription, guerilla art, (post-)graffiti, muralism, public writing and many more. I

employ the term street art as it is the most prevalent one in circulation and because it

potentially encompasses all of those other ones. In the course of the present paper, the term

street art will be used to denote self-authorized practices of visual, performative, and creative

interventions in (usually urban) public space, utilizing both official and unofficial forms of

art. The most common forms of street art are tagging and graffiti writing or bombing

(applying the pseudonym of a writer on a wall), stenciling, paste-ups (drawings or prints on

paper which are glued to the wall with glue), culture jamming (manipulating advertisements)

yarn bombing or urban knitting, guerilla gardening, slogan writing, muralism (usually

artworks produced with paint and brush) and temporary installations. Clearly delimiting the

repertoire of street art is, however, impossible as old techniques cross-breed and bring about

new ones (such as moss graffiti, a hybrid of graffiti writing and guerilla gardening) and new

practices continuously emerge.

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2. METHODOLOGIES

This paper is based on a two-month field research stay in Athens between January and April

2013, so that a few remarks on the methodological strategies employed to generate and

interpret data are as much in order as a discussion of some of the challenges and issues

encountered in doing so. Generally speaking, the research conducted can be classified as a

visual ethnography; ethnographic in the sense that it is informed and structured by some

classic methods of ethnology such as participant observation, the keeping of a field diary and

the carrying out of qualitative interviews; visual in the sense that it is concerned with an

analysis of visual artifacts and relies on photographic archives. However, these

methodological vocabularies can never be more than an approximation of the actual research

experience and underwent a process of continuous negotiation and modification in the field.

2.1. RESEARCHING STREET ART

To date street art has never been subject of an extensive ethnographic research or an analysis

that does not merely engage with its manifestations but also gets involved with the artists

behind them. Consequently there are no reliable sources on how to approach this diverse and

ephemeral phenomenon methodologically. As I will argue in the next chapter, street art

constitutes a distinct cultural practice. Yet, it lacks a clear ancestral line and the variety of

actors engaged with it as well as its peculiar temporality invite multiple challenges to

ethnographic fieldwork. First of all connecting the practice with a clearly delimitable

community is quite problematic. Even the artists who define themselves as street artists only

selectively maintain relations with one another and are at times very protective of their

identities, avoiding public interaction. Others, particularly those from the more politically

motivated spectrum, simply consider public writing a means for spreading collective political

identities and ideas and most likely do not individually define themselves as street artists just

because they occasionally make use of the practice. Depending on these factors, the

possibilities for interaction with artists are very different, so that my materials are inevitably

of varying qualities. However, by attending a number of potentially connected events and

venues – the more obvious being gallery openings, art and graffiti shops, but also

demonstrations, film screenings, assemblies of political groups and even a touristic street art

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walking tour – I managed to engage with almost all of those aspects in some way. Beyond

that, dealing with the actual artworks is another issue since being present for the process of

their creation largely depends on coincidence and retrospectively tracing the date and

circumstance of it is near impossible. To accommodate this, I consciously treat the artworks

on the walls of Athens as artifacts of a city at a time of crisis and interpret them as such3. The

various connections between the contemporary street art on the walls of Athens and the crisis

will be further elaborated upon in chapter five.

2.2. A VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Visual media have long been a crucial element of ethnographic research, serving

as cultural texts, as representations of ethnographic knowledge and as sites of cultural

production, social interaction and individual experience that themselves constitute

ethnographic fieldwork locales (Pink 2007: 1).

In the case of my own field research these functions overlap in multiple ways. Not only was I

interested in artistic, visual renderings on the walls of Athens, but I also compiled my own

extensive archive of photographic representations of them. At the same time I inevitably

began to follow the global circulation of images both about the crisis and the street art it

inspires. Addressing this variety of visual practices that I employed in the field

3 Considering that street art is to a large extent ephemeral it is safe to assume that most of the contemporary

artworks have been produced after the crisis started in 2008.

Figure 2 Map of the photographs I took in Athens

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methodologically is thus a challenging exercise. My analysis will be based on the

photographic archive that I generated myself, because it enables me to reconstruct information

such as the surroundings that I found the artwork in or its potential relationships with other

objects or artworks. During the two months of my fieldwork I took approximately one

thousand pictures documenting a substantial part of what I found on the walls of Athens.

From these I chose 850 photographs – sorting out particularly old artworks or frequent

repetitions – to be used as a representative sample. This selection is, however, somewhat

limited due to certain factors. First of all, certain parts of Athens are completely covered in

street art, smaller scribbles and slogans being one of the most common forms represented.

Clearly the essential element of those is their – often quite complex – meaning rather than

their usually inconspicuous form. Consequently they often escaped my perception or had to

be mediated to me by translation on account of my limited skills with the Greek language. So

even though they permeate my understanding of Athenian street art, the photographs I took

and with them my analyses will be slightly biased towards the more figurative spectrum. But

since complete representation cannot be much more than a positivist chimera anyway, I still

believe the 850 photographs to be a vital and representative selection.

Due to the spatial limitations of this paper I will not be able to explore the photographs

themselves as visual artifacts constituting their own cultural text (Evans & Hall 1999: 2). I

will instead treat them as representations of ethnographic knowledge and limit the analysis to

the artworks depicted in them. Within these artworks – which take forms as diverse as

slogans, stencils, and drawings on paper applied to the wall – I am particularly interested in

discourses and iconographies that relate to the crisis and work to undermine hegemonic

narratives disseminated by mass media and politics. Herein I lay a particular emphasis on

iconography as coined by Erwin Pankowsky. Placing the examination of the meaning of an

artwork over its form, iconographic analysis consists of three types of visual interpretation:

the primary or pre-iconographic stage, which describes the mere recognition of the matter; the

secondary or iconographic stage, evaluating which images bear particular symbolic

significance; and the intrinsic or iconological stage, in which those symbolisms are analyzed

according to their general cultural significance. Particularly the higher planes of interpretation

demand from the researcher a deep familiarity with the context of the making of the artwork

as well as synthetic intuition, a sort of common sense (Rose 2001: 144). It is as I already

mentioned not really possible to reconstruct the very making of the artwork in most cases. I

argue, though, that two months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Athens street art scene and

information derived from numerous conversations and interviews with artists as well as

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observers provide me with the deep familiarity required to actually understand and

contextualize the iconographies and discourses present in the artworks.

2.3. PROCESSING DATA

As indicated above, the data I collected during the research amount to an eclectic collection of

photographs, field diary jottings, as well as a variety of different interview types. While the

general observations and informal conversations and interviews with experts captured in the

field diary inform my writing in a more general sense, I systematically coded both the

interviews and the photographs using the software MAXQDA. In the case of the 13 artist

interviews considered I had to accommodate a range of different qualities and degrees of

formality. Among them are four transcripts of semi-structured oral interviews of between 60

and 90 minutes, six interviews conducted via email as well as three summaries of informal

conversations based on field diary jottings. In order to organize these accounts, I assigned

seven rather broad codes in correspondence with the questions I repeatedly asked in

interviews: motivation and artistic biography, influences, relationship with space and

architecture in the creative process, the specific role of Athens, its street art scene, politics,

and crisis. Ten of the interviewed artists are native Greeks whom – with one exception –

currently reside in Greece. The other three include: a native Indonesian who has been living in

Athens for six years, an Erasmus student from Barcelona and a French artist residing in

France yet maintaining a very close long-term relationship with Athens. Two of them are

female. As for their primary occupation – only few of them are established and working

artists – there is a broad spectrum to be found, encompassing students, usually located in the

fields of art, design, and architecture, small business owners, dentists as well as freelance

tattoo artists and graphic designers. Whereas the coding of the interviews was to facilitate an

overview over specific statements and topics, in the case of the photographs the same

technique was meant to enable a quantification of certain tendencies. Every photograph was

coded according to a minimum of three variables: the specific location in Athens, the

technique employed and the form of the content. Additionally I tracked certain elements of

meaning for the qualitative analysis such as representations of protest scenes and symbolic

icons connected to that like gas masks and molotov cocktails.

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3. THEORETICAL APPROACHES

The research question encompasses a number of large theoretical issues ranging from urban

space, the right to the city and street art to the crisis. In the following chapter those fields of

interest will be narrowed down to some crucial aspects. This will include an understanding of

contemporary cities and the production of urban space as well as the critical claims of the

right to the city and spatial justice. Furthermore I will examine the theoretical implications of

street art as a cultural practice and critically review the existing theoretical and historical

narratives attached to it. Eventually the term the crisis will be located and discussed as a

theoretical and ontological problem.

3.1. URBAN SPACE AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

Street art is a specifically urban practice. Therefore it is crucial to develop an understanding

of the contemporary cities that serve as physical, virtual and political frames of reference for

artists. At the basis of everything lies the realization, most prominently articulated by Henri

Lefebvre (2007), that cities are fundamentally socially constructed, or as he has it, form a

complex social text (368). Consequently, urban space is a product of dialogic interaction

between the actors and institutions coexisting in it. This includes the distinct spatial practice,

indicating the organizing principle of a society which secretes urban space while

simultaneously trying to master and appropriate it, the conceptual representations of space

expressed in patterns of planning and design and the representational space, imagined, lived,

and experienced by urban dwellers (Lefebvre 2000: 198). The analytical relevance of this

abstract pattern becomes clearer when it is specified for contemporary cities. Their spatial

practice is constituted by an orientation towards neoliberal capitalism, dividing the city into

functional parcels that are associated with the different functions essential for maintaining the

system: domestic reproduction, labor, accumulation of capital etc. Representations of space

layer urban space with the according rational principles of organization, structures, and

symbolic economies. The result is a fragmented sprawl of communicative signs and symbols

reproducing the dominant socio-political premises and preferable images of the city (Zukin

2000: 81). The strategic appropriation of these structures and symbols by city dwellers in

everyday lived reality forms the representational space. Urban space is thus deeply permeated

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by power relations, however, “[e]ven neocapitalism or ‘organized’ capitalism, even

technocratic planners and programmers, cannot produce a space with a perfectly clear

understanding of cause and effect, motive and implication” (Lerfebvre 2000: 197). Spatial

production is a fundamentally unstable system, continually oscillating between past and

present thereby forming a fragile etymology of spaces (ibid: 197) while also leaving cracks

and voids in the urban fabric that potentially become strategic sites for marginalized actors,

that are enabled to indirectly emerge as political actors contesting the urban meta-narrative

(Sassen 2007: 162).

Most critical writing about cities of the past two decades have focused on the deregulation of

urban space in favor of increased privatization and commodification, resulting in a growing

exclusion and disempowerment of urban citizens. These power asymmetries particularly

affect social groups that constitute the marginalized classes of urban others – precarious

migrants, non-white populations, low-income households etc. – and have done so for a long

time. Coincidental to those analyses, two closely related concepts have gained considerable

currency in the past decade in both critical urban theory and activist practice: the right to the

city and spatial justice. While the latter stands for the more general claim of “more equitable

access of all residents to the social resources and advantages that the city provides” (Soja

2010: 32), the right to the city signifies the right to urban life (Lefebvre 2007: 374), the right

of urban citizens to collectively and actively participate in the creation and reinvention of

cities according to their own human needs and desires (Harvey 2012: 4). Both concepts

essentially question the urban status quo, the spatial production that is rooted in neoliberal

capitalism and reciprocally reinforces it. Among other things they actively challenge the

notions of privatization and property rights by locating them as the very source of injustice.

[S]patial injustice [is] deeply rooted in the naturalized sanctification of property rights and

privileges. Every square inch of every market-based economy has been commodified and

commercialized into parcels of valued land that are owned by individuals, corporations […],

or by the state (Soja 2010: 44).

Born out of this new consciousness, contemporary urban activisms have been working

towards reclaiming urban space as lived space, making use of both old (e.g. protest and

occupation) and new (e.g. urban gardening) subversive spatial strategies. As I will argue

subsequently, the practice of street art too bears at its core this claim of the right to the city.

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3.2. THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF STREET ART

Street art and the various practices implied by it have been the subject of public and academic

interest since the 1970s. The topic has been discussed under a broad range of disciplinary

backgrounds including art history, consumer research, linguistics, philosophy, urban

sociology, political sciences, and anthropology. However:

We can safely make a claim […] that little is known about public writing and that

typically it is not investigated in ways that yield questions more challenging than the

standard labeling dilemma of art versus crime and the base narratives that follow one of the

other trajectory (Chmielewska 2009: 33).

The understanding of street art that I aim to develop is mainly informed by the small number

of analyses that focus on exploring the political potential of street art as an urban

interventionist practice. Even though these accounts are far from representing a coherent

theoretical body of work, they share the assumption that street art is a critical social and

cultural practice through which “people write, explore and, ultimately, come to know the city”

(Dickens 2008: 2f). As a spatial intervention it further challenges and contests dominant

notions and ideologies of what urban space should be, implicitly questioning public

ownership, representational regimes and the right to the city (Anderson et al. 2010: 512). The

very political significance of street art works on three overlapping levels: the appropriation

and reinterpretation of urban space, the actual message encrypted, and the subsequent

generation of alternative discursive communicative channels. There exists a variety of

motivations informing the various ways of engaging in the play with urban space. They range

from actively contesting the capitalist consumption imperative represented in the visual

marketing regime of ubiquitous ads, challenging the hypocrisy of clean walls and denouncing

the state of the society behind them, to beautification, circulating political thoughts and ideas

and self-affirmation. While these different stances might carry very diverse individual

agencies, they all share the aim for spatial appropriation and create a dialogue with the cities

symbolic architecture which in turn stimulates passersby to rethink these contested spaces and

establish a critical relationship with their urban surroundings. Street art can thus be described

as a practice of creative disruption and distortion, working to dissolve the boundaries between

public and private space, thereby reclaiming urban public space back to its rightful owner, the

public (ibid: 513ff).

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This specific interpretation of the political significance of street art is deeply rooted in the

popular historic narrative attached to it. Commonly it is assumed that street art emerged from

the graffiti subculture that developed as a part of hip hop culture in North-American

metropolises in the 1970s. As a practice of marginalized urban inner city youth, tagging and

graffiti writing here represented a form of self-affirmation and territorial marking, constituting

an exclusive movement resting on a system of internalized languages and codes, carried out as

a typographic, even calligraphic, form of urban inscription (Lewisohn 2008: 15ff). In contrast,

street art is the label – or more correctly one of the labels – subsuming the more playful

practices that graffiti diversified into from the 1980s onwards. Here, the walls and streets of

cities are no longer the mere canvas and backdrop for artistic expressions. Instead urban space

is actively incorporated into the artworks in reflexive and dialogic interaction (Dickens 2008:

14ff). Simultaneously the aesthetic focus shifted from typography towards a rather inclusive,

universally legible graphic language of symbols, characters and signs referring to and citing

from the iconography of mass culture (Lewisohn 2008: 15ff). Even though this historical

narrative certainly helps broadly contextualizing the formation of street art, it is insufficient

and problematic in two ways: on the one hand it privileges street art over graffiti in terms of

political significance and thereby dichotomizes two practices whose spatial politics are

essentially the same. On the other hand the position from which the history is narrated is

fundamentally Western-centric, as New York is defined as the single origin of the movement

from which it was then imported into the world by cultural transmission. Frequently this leads

to a negligence of the many local histories of public writing and art, such as the tradition of

muralism in South America, or urban political slogan writing as practiced systematically by

the West-Berlin squatters movement of the early 1980s. The notorious lack of localized case

studies and field research further deepens this divide. Concerning the persistent dichotomy

used to distinguish street art and graffiti, the work of Jean Baudrillard (1978) is potentially

illuminating. In his linguistic and philosophical analysis of New York’s early graffiti scene as

a disruptive guerilla force born out of marginalization and repression, it becomes quite clear

that the spatio-political logics of graffiti and street art are much more similar than they are

different. According to Baudrillard the urban inscriptions of graffiti writing and tagging

challenge the system of language and signification, constituting a linguistic ghetto and

inscribing territorial claims as an emancipatory practice. As a tattooing, graffiti then

transforms the city back into an organic body without a clear beginning and ending and

thereby blurs and ultimately seeks to destroy the boundaries imposed by technocratic city

planning (26ff). Despite at times relying on different vocabularies of expression, both street

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art and graffiti engage with and disrupt the spatial configuration of the city, ultimately

reclaiming it as a lived space in the spirit of the right to the city. As not to reinforce the

mentioned artificial hierarchy between the two, I do not use them separately in the course of

this paper but instead opt to subsume graffiti as a specific practice under the umbrella term

street art. It has to be pointed out, however, that even within the practice a number of power

asymmetries come into play. Generally the artists and writers are no longer exclusively

marginalized urban youths but in the majority cosmopolitan white middle-class males. The

increasing globalization and commercialization of the phenomenon has additionally deepened

this divide by materially benefiting mainly white male Western artists. Street art being

considered a largely masculine domain, it also proves hard for female writers to establish

themselves against the grain of the commonly sexist tendencies in scenes across the globe. At

the same time the practices of street art are becoming more and more transparent and

accessible with the growing number of online tutorials, explaining how to create a stencil

from a picture using open access software or how to cook indestructible glue to effectively

stick posters or paste-ups to city walls. Books and online photo sharing further circulate the

aesthetics and politics of street art. Consequently individuals and social movements continue

to appropriate the walls of their metropolises as spaces of public expression claiming their

right to the city – even more so in the current state of crisis.

3.3. ON THE CRISIS

As previously mentioned, the associations evoked by the term the crisis could hardly be any

more numerous, diverse and complex. Approaching it theoretically as a whole is thus all the

more complicated. What I attempt in the following paragraphs is by no means an attempt at

defining what the crisis is, but rather a fragmented compilation of potentially productive ideas

on how to approach it intellectually. The term crisis has most commonly been used to

describe the global financial crisis and simultaneous deep recession in mainly North-America

and Europe since 2007/08. At least two competing meta-narratives circulate about the origins

of the crisis, the more conservative one focusing on the events that lead to and followed the

bankruptcy of the US-American bank Lehmann Brothers in 2008. The problem is herein

located in certain faulty institutions and actors (e.g. so called bad banks) that subvert the

otherwise unproblematic economic and political system. A more progressive approach sees

the basis of the crisis in the system of global neoliberal capitalism itself and assumes that the

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origins of the present crisis go as far back as the 1970s and an escalation has since been

delayed (Wieviorka 2012: 86f). According to the different patterns of explanation employed,

the word crisis has been combined with a multitude of prefixes: financial, bank, fiscal, debt,

political, social, Euro – all denoting more or less the same processes. Most critical theoretical

reflections on the matter, share the idea that the crisis is structural, multidimensional and

transformative for politics, economics, as well as the material quality of everyday life

(Castells et al. 2012: 1ff). The multidimensional or multiple crisis thus operates on several

interdependent levels: the crisis of financial accumulation, the social crisis, and the crisis of

reproduction, parliamentary democracy, and political representation (Bader et al. 2011: 13).

How all of those overlapping dynamics actually manifest in precise contexts, however, can

only be elaborated upon on the basis of case studies, as I will proceed to attempt for the case

of Greece and specifically Athens in the following chapter.

But where does the word crisis actually have its etymological origin? It derives from the

Greek kerein, meaning to separate or cut something, to make it fixed. First it was exclusively

used in a medical context to describe the critical turning point in the development of an illness

that would determine recovery or death. In the 17th

century the term was introduced into

economic and political contexts, again signifying a decisive stage in the progress of

something, most commonly a negative turn of events. The formation of the idea of crisis thus

coincides with and is molded against the background of the positivist agenda of progress and

development. Accordingly, for the longest time the term crisis has been used to describe one

particular point in time, which is then followed by a long aftermath. Contrary to this notion, in

representations of the present crisis the boundaries of cause and effect have been blurred

beyond the point of recognition. In this long crisis the range of standard vocabulary is no

longer fit to describe the situation. As Rosalind Williams (2012) argues, this actually

demarcates a shift towards a new historical consciousness:

The contemporary discussions of crisis and aftermath were not only redefining these terms but

also generating a set of new metaphors to describe contemporary history. The historical

pattern that kept being evoked was one not of logical cause and effect but rather an aesthetic

one. In a sort of collective exercise of free association, an image of fluid flow kept being

repeated: a “spill” […], a”flood”, an “ash cloud”, or more persistently, a “meltdown” (29).

Crisis as this prolonged state of exception ultimately creates a situation in which existing

modes of action cannot be continued, opening spaces for new practices both repressive and

emancipatory (Bader et al. 2011: 8f). In the course of this paper I will focus on the latter

variety and argue that street art is not only appropriated by emancipatory movements that

17

have emerged in Athens in the past years of crisis, but also experiences a renaissance as a

means of claiming political agency and claiming the right to the city. This further underlines

what has been prominently argued by David Harvey, that the crisis and all crises of the past

30 years have been rooted in cities. In capitalism, generated profit has to be reinvested in

profitable surplus outlets, one of the most popular one being urban property. The market

developments that eventually triggered the current crisis are thus closely entwined with the

neoliberal restructuring of the city based on privatization and commodification of urban

space. “My argument is that if this crisis is basically a crisis of urbanization then the solution

should be urbanization of a different sort and this is where the struggle for the right to the city

becomes crucial” (Harvey 2009).

18

4. SOME REMARKS ON THE LOCAL CONTEXT

Both my fieldwork and my research interest are deeply embedded in the specific geographies

of Athens and Greece, therefore a contextualization of a few local aspects is required. First of

all, I will explore the somewhat curious history of Greece as a site of anthropological research

and knowledge production. Subsequently I will approach the field site of contemporary

Athens by providing an overview of its developments and transformation in the post-

dictatorial era (1974-), providing the basis for further discussing how the recent crisis has

affected this particular urban landscape as well as in the wider socioeconomic fabric of

Greece.

4.1. GREECE AS A SITE OF RESEARCH

Greece has traditionally been treated as a country of exceptional regional status, one that is

both European and Oriental, positioned on the southern end of the Balkans yet fundamentally

Western (Dalakoglou & Vradis 2011a: 23). Particularly the idea of ancient Greece as “the

intellectual and spiritual birthplace of the Western cultures” and cradle of democracy as

deeply embedded with a Eurocentric ideology of world hegemony represents the single

overpowering frame of reference to this very day. “Greece tout court is almost always

automatically assumed to be ancient Greece; the modern country, even in its own travel

brochures, yields to the commanding presence of a high antiquity […]” (Herzfeld 2002: 900).

Ironically not that much is actually known about the cultural practices of ancient Greece that

surpasses the stereotypical depiction of a philosopher in a white tunic. All the while modern

Greece is notoriously absent from anthropological research and theory production. Michael

Herzfeld has proposed the term crypto-colonialism to analyze this contradictory relation.

Even though it is a country that was not directly affected by colonial rule in the 20th century,

Greece has always been heavily dependent on Western Europe economically. The focus on

the country’s historical meaning is thus an empty signifier obscuring its actual

marginalization. “They have been placed or placed themselves, on high cultural pedestals that

effectively isolate them from other, more brutally material forms of power” (ibid: 902).

Herzfeld further argues that even though the so called crypto-colonies to a large extent

suffered political and economic disadvantages similar to those in the formally colonized

19

countries, they are almost entirely excluded from the production of post-colonial – or any

anthropological – theory (ibid: 920f). Following the intense course of events revolving around

the crisis, contemporary Greece has presently resurfaced as a place of meaning. No country

has been as intensely and enduringly affected by the manifestation of the crisis in Europe than

Greece, making it almost synonymous with the so called Euro crisis. It is by now common

ground that Greece is “a thought-laboratory for the future of the Eurozone” (Penny 2012) –

politically, economically as well as culturally – so that it is not surprising that journalists and

researchers have become frequent visitors. Even some of my informants told me with slight

hints of annoyance that I am only one of many researchers approaching them for interviews

recently. While this newfound interest obviously represents an opportunity, it has to also be

reflected critically against the backdrop of its long history of absence. It is deeply embedded

in the hegemonic narrative of the European crisis as something that happens predominantly in

the margins and has to be deconstructed, understood, and eventually managed by experts from

the centre.

4.2. ATHENS IN THE POST-DICTATORIAL ERA

In order to understand the city of contradictions that is contemporary Athens a look at its long

history is inevitable. Due to spatial limitations I will, however, only focus on the past four

decades, specifically considering processes of urban development. During most of the 20th

century, up until the 1970s, there was virtually no urban planning implemented in Athens and

extensive unlicensed building was tolerated. The result was a messy urban sprawl of little

functionality. The first systematic attempts at rationalization were initiated in the early 1980s

after the entry into the European Union triggered a fast economic growth. These efforts

quickly condensed into a more holistic, neoliberal strategy of urban restructuring under what

is known as the period of strong Greece in the 1990s (Makrygianni & Tsavaroglou 2011:

30f). Essential for this development is the extensive economic growth of Greece – the highest

in the European Union between 1995 and 2007 – resulting in a proportionately growing

political influence which also profited to a great extent from the collapse of communism in

the neighboring countries of the Balkans. In 1996 Greece was rewarded with an international

spectacle to match its new confidence, the Olympic Games, to be carried out in Athens in

2004. The measures taken in preparation for this event intensified and accelerated the

processes of urban transformation already underway. Under the patronage of mainly private

20

investors Athens underwent large scale destruction, rebuilding and restructuring processes.

Besides the obvious construction of the Olympic facilities many new structures were built

anew or modernized: the subway system, the airport, the Attika toll way, the tram system,

shopping malls and the new Acropolis museum, to name but a few. Needless to say that the

speedy and parallel execution of so many construction projects relied on a steady supply of

cheap and unprotected labor, mainly provided by precarious migrants, and ruthless

exploitation of the environment (Dalakoglou 2012: 24ff). Apart from creating a monument for

the new strong Greece, the Olympic Games were also meant to advertise Athens

internationally as a beautiful, modern and safe city to visit. Accordingly some attempts at

strategic gentrification were undertaken at several central districts – especially targeting

public squares like Omonoia, Syntagma or Exarcheia. Not only did this mean new pavements

and fancy cafés but also the elimination of perceived undesired elements such as drug users,

sex workers, homeless people and stray animals from public space. Much more important,

however, was the matter of safety, even more so since the Athens Games were to be the first

Olympics after 9/11. As a consequence new anti-terrorism laws were passed – also leading to

a dismantling of the two largest Greek armed organizations, both with a radical left

orientation – and an extensive surveillance network installed. This security apparatus which is

largely operated by the police and military forces is still active at this point in time. The same

goes for the new special units formed to deal with large crowds and potential riots.

Remarkably, for the first time since the fall of the military regime the military was to become

active in the domestic context again, justified by the declaration of a state of exception

(Kompreser Collective 2012: 462ff). While the Olympics in 2004 were celebrated as

“crowning and at the same time the final gesture of the ‘powerful Greece’ strategy” (ibid:

461) they had also radically and permanently transformed the face of city of Athens. By the

end of the Olympics, the centre of Athens had been largely restructured and privatized which

also affected the social and cultural configurations of public space. Since construction sites

are usually not accessible during building, established geographies of transit were altered

considerably. Even the core functions of some spaces were redefined completely. Syntagma

square for example used to be a vibrant, open public square and was transformed into more of

a transit space after being assigned the role of central transport hub. Further it was physically

enclosed and the attached streets made into luxury boulevards, so that the square gradually

became more exclusive and less open. In accordance with the regeneration and gentrification

of certain neighborhoods real estate prices also increased perceptively. Due to Athens’ long

21

tradition of mixed land use this did not, however, trigger a process of urban segregation

(Dalakoglou 2012: 26ff).

While political portrayals and economic statistics unilaterally attribute a rapid and widespread

increase in wealth and standard of living to these years, this was never true for all participants

in the Greek society. Particularly young Greeks and immigrants were affected negatively by

the neoliberal reorganization of the state causing multiple pre-crisis conflicts. Even with low

rates of unemployment, the Greek youth has been suffering from chronic underemployed

since the 1990s. The so-called 700 € generation was severely affected by EU measures aimed

at increasing labor flexibility through among other things internship programs (Dalakoglou

2012: 25). A large amount of high school and university movements in the 1990s and 2000s –

many of which took place in Athens – bears witness to a political radicalization of the Greek

youth, the group perhaps most disadvantaged by the neoliberal restructuring of society. In the

2000s this new movement experienced a process of internationalization. Activists from

Greece participated in transnational protests – such as 2001 in Genoa – and began engaging in

anti-EU and alterglobalization movements (Giovanopoulos & Dalakoglou 2011: 91ff).

Another important development undercutting the seemingly impeccable era of the strong

Greece is the growing influx of migrants. In the 1990s those new populations mainly hailed

from the post-communist states of the Balkan region, particularly Albania, but were soon

replaced by refugees from the worlds’ war and conflict zones such as Afghanistan, Pakistan

and Iraq. Those mainly undocumented people began to occupy the urban centre of Athens to

remain less visible often ending up in situations of extreme poverty and precariousness

(Dalakoglou 2012: 24f). So even though the years immediately before the arrival of the

economic crisis are often represented as a success story of prosperity, many groups were

excluded from these developments creating fissions in society that were eventually reinforced

in the wake of the crisis and triggered some of the most intense moments of conflict.

The points made here primarily refer to the very centre of Athens, an urban agglomeration of

a higher population density that any other European Metropolis. Surprisingly, the

neighborhoods concerned contain a broad spectrum of social strata. Not only is there a long

tradition of mixed land use that prevents or at the least slows down processes of urban

segregation, the arrangement of the typical Athens housing block epitomizes that tendency.

The different floors tend to be associated with different social groups which consequently

intermingle in daily life (Makrygianni & Tsavaroglou 2011: 33f). This special configuration

of urban space ensures that the centre of Athens remains a space of vitality, yet also produces

22

tensions; a contradiction crucial for understanding the impact of the crisis on the city of

Athens.

4.3. THE CRISIS AS A NATIONAL AND URBAN PHENOMENON

With Greece having become the poster child for failure in media representations of the

economic crisis, and virtually the embodiment its European variant, finding appropriate ways

of describing the situation is, to say the least, challenging. This is even more relevant when

considering my position in the field as a researcher from Germany. After all, the crisis is to a

large extent constituted by an asymmetrical system of knowledge production. Specifically in

the case of Europe the crisis is discussed as a phenomenon that takes place in the periphery

and has to be regulated from the relatively stable centre, Germany and Greece usually

epitomizing the opposed ends of the spectrum. Consequently this is not meant in any way to

represent a comprehensive explanation of what happened to the Greek economic and political

system. Instead, I intend to make the local manifestations of the crisis understandable by

focusing on a set of very tangible events, effects, and conflicts associated with it. In order to

do so, I will first roughly sketch how the development and meaning of the crisis are portrayed

in mass media and politics and how critical scholarship has intervened. Then, focusing mainly

on conflicts, movements and developments set in Athens, I want to argue, that in this context

the crisis and the subversive practices it gave birth to represent to a large degree a struggle for

urban spatial justice and the right to the city. Generally the crisis is thought to have first

entered Greece in about 2008, yet not necessarily as a material reality but rather a slightly

detached economic discourse. After it had become clear that the euphoric fiscal balance

numbers provided in the previous years did not hold up, in 2009 the country’s credit rating

was downgraded. In consequence the Greek state could not supply itself with loan money any

longer threatening to cause sovereign default. This finally led to the negotiation and signing of

the first memorandum of cooperation with the Troika – consisting of the International

Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Union – in May

2010. The agreement according to the memorandum was that Greece would be granted loans

by the Troika and in return implement harsh austerity measures to drastically reduce national

spending and restore its fiscal balance. Ever since 2010 representatives and associates of the

Troika have been returning to Greece regularly to evaluate the effects of the measures and to

renegotiate the terms of cooperation (Dalakoglou 2012: 35). As the austerity measures are

23

largely aimed at reducing public welfare spending – pensions, health care, unemployment

benefits – they have triggered a social meltdown in as little as two years and have

consequently been met with extensive criticism and protest.

So far, most of the circulating analyses and interpretations of the Greek crisis come from

journalists, economists and politicians. In those accounts, the crisis is depicted as a sudden

and more or less unexpected explosion in national debt – surpassing by far the prescribed

maximum for a member of the European Union. This is usually attributed to bad governance

on behalf of Greece – clientelism, corruption and forged statistics provided to the controlling

institutions of the European Union – as well as a general criticism of the Greek people

supposedly living above their means (Avramidis 2012: 2). Implied in this analysis is a

normative judgment based on the idea of debt as the rational measure of good fiscal politics.

Consequently the waves of protest evoked especially by the austerity measures are dismissed

“almost as a revolt of spoiled children: a population living beyond its means, rising up in a

tantrum when forced to face the fiscal discipline it has for so long, and so unrealistically,

resisted” (Graeber 2011: 229). The austerity measures are thus justified as the rightful

punishment for a misbehaving people and their government and a necessary corrective act in

order to achieve the unquestioned goal of returning to the normality of neoliberal capitalism

(Tsilimpounidi 2012: 548). A growing number of critical authors such as anthropologists

David Graeber and Dimitris Dalagoglou as well as critical geographer Antonis Vradis have

pointed out the problematic nature of such discourses. For not only do they omit crucial

aspects such as Greece’s unproportional military and police spending – generating profits

largely benefitting Germany and France – they also represent the crisis as a mere failure in an

otherwise intact system without questioning the systemic inequalities created by global

neoliberal capitalism. Following these recent interventionist academic discourses I will now

propose an analysis of the crisis as an urban phenomenon through a series of events and

movements in Athens.

The first of those events is not exclusively connected to the crisis, yet reciprocally meaningful

in various ways – the shooting of Alexis Grigoropoulos on the streets of Exarcheia on 6

December 2008 and the ensuing protest movements. The 15-year old Grigoropoulos was out

with friends when a minor dispute with two police broke out – not an unusual scene in the

allegedly anarchist neighborhood – that ended with the teenage boy shot dead at the hands of

the two police. News of the incident travelled fast and infuriated anarchists started rioting the

same night. In the following weeks a growing anti-authoritarian alliance of long-term radical

24

activist, angry students, precarious migrants, soccer hooligans and members of the 700 €

generation took to the streets and launched the biggest uprising in the post-dictatorial era

(Vradis 2009: 146f). The riots erupted straight out of the urban core moving along pre-

existing structures and geographies of resistance but in the course of a few weeks also

spreading out to include the whole city in the struggle (Makrygianni & Tsavaroglou 2011:

29). The repertoire of the riots did not only include destructive rioting and protest marches but

also prominently made use of graffiti and street art along the way – the aspect of spatial

occupation always playing a prominent role.

The assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos happened in public, at the corner of Mesologiou

and Tzavela street. In the same public way, thousands filled the public space claiming it as a

space for meeting and “doing” life in the city, and not as a place of death for its inhabitants

(Makrygianni & Tsavaroglou 2011: 45).

One project that was born in the spirit of the December uprising particularly reverberates this

logic, the urban community garden at Navarinou street in Exarcheia – just a few steps away

from the place of Grigoropoulos’ assassination. It started when in March 2009 some local

residents decided to transform one of the many fallow parking spaces of the city into

something useful and began to clear away the concrete surface and plant. Despite at times

fierce opposition and counteraction by city institutions – for instance cutting off the water and

electricity supply – the relentless fight and unified solidarity from the neighborhood has made

the parkingparko one of the most successful projects of the past years. Not only does it

produce consumable vegetables and represent one of the few green spots in the centre of

Athens. Besides it hosts film screenings and discussions during the summer months and is

involved with a number of other neighborhood initiatives. In its logic of self-empowerment of

local urban alliances the park thus represents iconically the struggle for the right to the city as

a practice of lived space (Dalakoglou & Vradis 2011b: 78). The events and effects of 2008

were not directly related to the debt crisis as such. However:

[T]he December 2008 revolt signified the spontaneous social response to the

culminating social crisis that had been going on for over a decade of neoliberal

configurations, [while] the debt crisis is an escalation of this wider crisis carrying

enormous structural violence and extending the state of exception from a few groups

(migrants, underemployed youth etc.) to the majority of the population

(Dalakoglou 2011: 541).

Looking to the protests and riots in response to the austerity policies and the policies of the

Troika, the events of 2008 and 2009 had a formative impact on the culture and aesthetic of

protesting. But before analyzing the antagonisms against the politics of the memorandum, I

25

want to outline briefly the impact they have had on the city of Athens. The welfare cuts

enforced in accordance with the dogma of austerity, mark a drastic shift towards neoliberal

Western governance and have paved the road for an accelerated social meltdown, presenting

among other things in a general health decline, growing unemployment, and increasing

suicide rates (Dalakoglou 2012: 36). This has also lead to extreme changes in the physical and

social fabric of the city: homelessness, increased unsafe drug abuse, prostitution, vacant shops

and houses – often nailed shut to prevent people from living in there – abandoned

construction sites and an increased presence of police surveillance. Urban space in crisis is

thus at the same time deregulated and militarized. Particularly revealing is the new class of

the nouveau poor, often people who formerly belonged to the ranks of the aspiring middle

classes but have fallen through the ever-expanding gaps in the grid of social welfare. The

nouveau poor cut across lines of ethnicity, age, gender, and education and do not directly

participate in political and social movements. As the city of Athens has never faced such

extreme amounts of people in need, there are hardly any institutions fit to deal with homeless

people or drug users. Instead the problems are visibly laid bare in the streets of the urban

centre, cumulating in the first ever humanitarian crisis faced by a member of the European

Union (Kaika 2012: 423ff). Walking through the central district of Athens in the year 2013

this situation is painfully tangible. As a result of this wider social meltdown, increasing

societal divisions become visible in urban public space. As a prolonged state of

exceptionalism, the crisis becomes the new backdrop for claims of citizenship and othering as

well as the resulting rhetoric of blame and exclusion (Avramidis 2012: 3). In the case of

Greece this has recently meant placing the blame on two sets of outsiders: the international

capitalist elite clustered around the much-hated Troika and the immigrants, whose state of

precariousness has worsened even further with the austerity policies (Herzfeld 2011: 23). It is

thus hardly surprising that the growing influence and acceptance of the racist propaganda

disseminated by notorious neo-nazi party χρυση αυγη (Golden Dawn) coincides with the

crisis. Not only does it entail a simple discursive externalization of the crisis and its effect but

also a translation of that logic into racist attacks, which have exponentially increased in the

past years. While just the number of individual incidents is alarming, there are even attempts

of systematically keeping specific neighborhoods migrant-free by installing violent patrols

(Dalakoglou & Vradis 2011b: 80ff).

Naturally, since the very signing of the memorandum there have been a number of critical

practices opposing the austerity measures. Most visibly there was a number of general strikes

and protest marches, which were for the first time not only attended by the classical leftist

26

rioters but also newly precarious members of the middle class, stay-at-home mothers, new and

old immigrants, pensioners, children etc. Despite the broad societal composition of the

protesters, they were continuously met with violent police crack-downs that regularly covered

the city in the smell of teargas – a shock for many of the participants who had never been part

of a protest. By now, the sequence of protest, police crack-down, and riots, has become a

common ritual to most residents of Athens, with less and less of them believing in a potential

of change. The peak of the protest movement can probably be seen in the occupation of

Syntagma square in June 2011. For almost a month the square was claimed for both old

strategies of protest and confrontations and new experiments of cultural expression and direct

democracy (Leontidou 2012: 306). Similarly the anti-austerity movement is not – and was

never – restricted to the practice of protest and occupation. There are growing numbers of

movements attempting to address the needs of a city in austerity in a more pragmatic fashion

– including non-monetary exchange systems such as most prominently time banks, direct

consumer-producer networks, neighborhood initiatives, and attempts at establishing

autonomous institutions such as health clinics (Dalakoglou 2011: 541). Furthermore artistic

expression – among others in the form of street art – has become as crucial an aspect of

dealing with the realities of the austerity city as has a new hedonistic party culture, somewhat

reminiscent of East Berlin of the early 1990s.

The developments and movements of Athens since 2008 make clear that the manifold effects

of and approaches to the crisis are always embedded in the specific geographies of urban

public space in Athens. Protesting and rioting are the most important and meaningful

practices therein. By temporarily claiming and transforming public space, protests provide an

opportunity to explore common grievances, negotiate and represent concerns and issues in an

inclusive manner. “By creating a march in the midst of the city space, the protestors achieve a

subversion of the hegemonic uses of space” (Tsilimpounidi 2012: 548). While the destructive

and aggressive character of riots may not find general approval, they inscribe the spatial

claims expressed in protests into the cities physical surface therein permanently transforming

urban space.

After the demonstrations were over, the jagged edges of marble facings in the centre of Athens

offered expressive testimony to the rampaging demonstrators. These young people, clearly

unimpressed by the neo-classical pretensions on display in these extravagances, but perhaps

with fine historical sensibility associating them with both wealth and Western domination, had

torn off chunks of the stonework and hurled them at the police (Herzfeld 2011: 23).

27

The movements of December 2008 and the anti-austerity movement since 2010

simultaneously represent a struggle over the urban territory and question the dominant

meanings of public space produced by city planning and administration (Makrygianni &

Tsavaroglou 2011: 48). These movements are not spontaneous but can be traced back to

earlier waves of protest directed at the neoliberal restructuring of the city and Greece as a

whole, such as in the course of the Olympic Games. Remarkably, despite the drastic

restructuring and change in the physical landscape of Athens, specific spaces have retained

their political significance over long periods of time due to their strong historical symbolism

and centrality. This is most obvious in the case of Syntagma Square and the campus of

Polytechneio University. The former has – despite drastic restructuring and enclosing –

remained an important political landmark due to its closeness to the parliament building. The

Polytechneio has a strong historical significance as in 1973 it was the site of the protest that

would initiate the fall of the military regime one year later (Leontidou 2012: 303f). Athens’

political, economic, social, and material landscapes have drastically changed in the post-

dictatorial period, mainly under the rubric of neoliberal restructuring. This logic was

accelerated in the course of the spectacle of the Olympic Games and its destructive nature laid

bare in the exceptional situation of the crisis. Consequently the new movements and tools for

political subversion that have emerged out of not only the recent crisis but also the many

small crises preceding it in anticipation are fundamentally concerned with reclaiming urban

space as democratic site of urban life, expression, and criticism. They challenge the

hegemonic spatial production of Neoliberalism and question the implicit imperatives of

legitimate use of urban space and stand, fundamentally, in the spirit and tradition of the right

to the city.

28

5. SETTING THE SCENE

Having explored the general local context of the research, this chapter is meant to provide an

overview of the more specific field of street art in Athens, an immediate basis for the

following analysis. This will include a general description of the role of street art and its

histories, as well as comments on the legal situation, its general acceptance and the variables

that set the Athens scene apart from other European cities. Two other sections will deal more

specifically with the influence the crisis has had on the street art scene and the artists

involved.

5.1. STREET ART IN ATHENS

Narrowing down the role and history of street art and graffiti in Athens is quite a complicated

task, since there are no comprehensive accounts and sources to rely on. Most commonly it is

assumed that graffiti, inspired by North-American and West-European traditions identified

with urban hip hop culture, has only started to appear in Greece since about the early 1990s

and only diversified into the more sophisticated art forms subsumed by the term street art

since about 2000. It can, however, be presumed that there are longer traditions of public

writing and art in Athens than it is usually credited for “due to its turbulent past and its

tolerant citizens” (Avramidis 2012: 4) – especially when it comes to political slogan writing.

Evidence of that is scattered all over photo archives across Greece but also surfaces regularly

in narrations about the resistance movements against the national socialist occupation and the

dictatorship as well as the civil war in between. Various examples can be found in Alinda

Dimitriou’s oral history style documentary trilogy about the role of women in political

activism in Greece4. As the women involved tell their stories of disobedience, fight and

detention they often recall strategically engaging in writing on walls as a political practice,

either to communicate and coordinate with other underground groups in a sort of encrypted

language or to spread subversive messages of encouragement, hope and strength to their

fellow people. To what extent this took place can only be estimated but there are strong

indications that both the writing of political slogans and the general idea of claiming walls as

spaces of expression and resistance have their own historical relevance in Greece. This is even

4 Πουλιά στο βάλτο or Birds in the Mire (2008), Η ζωή στους βράχους or Life among the Rocks (2009) and Τα

κορίτσια της βροχής or Girls of the Rain (2012)

29

more significant looking at the situation in current Athens, where street art and graffiti have

become an overwhelming force and integral part of the cities physical appearance – political

slogan writing representing a considerable share. Generally, the highest densities can be found

in the central districts of the cities, especially the ones where students, marginalized migrants

and more left-leaning people live. Particularly Exarcheia and the adjoining Omonoia, where I

took more than half of my pictures, are completely covered in paint and slogans. On the one

hand this has to do with their respective demographics – Exarcheia is often referred to as

“anarchists fortress” or “ghetto” (Vradis 2012: 88) while Omonoia is where high

concentrations of precarious, often undocumented migrants can be found alongside extreme

manifestations of homelessness, drug abuse and prostitution, often overlapping with one

another. On the other hand there are two specific sites of political and spatial meaning that

contribute to that considerably: the Polytechneio university campus and Tsavela street, where

in 2008 Alexis Grigoropoulos was shot by two police. The former has a political history going

back to 1973 when a student strike, despite being violently beaten down by the military,

initiated the fall of the dictatorial regime. Subsequently the campus was declared a police free

zone and has been a focal point for social movements ever since. Both places are covered in

paint and words from top to bottom. While the Polytechneio is a little fenced off and situated

Figure 3 Memorial of A. Grigoropoulos at Tsavela

30

on the margins of Exarcheia, the small pedestrian street Tsavela is right in the heart of the

district. As Laurie Penny describes

It’s almost as if you were approaching a central source, the point where all that paint and rage

and poetry roiled and exploded, the nest where the angry slogans hatch at night to crawl over

every wall in Athens. As you turn the corner of Tzavella [sic] Street, here it is (Penny 2012).

Yet another circumstance encouraging the abundance of street art is the fact that in Exarcheia

since 2008 regular police patrolling has been replaced with a kind of permanent siege. So

even though there are squads of riot police guarding the borders of the district, the centre of it

is virtually police-free, allowing artists to paint on the street even in broad daylight.

Additionally, vast quantities of artworks in the street can be found in the central districts

Metaxourgio, Kerameikos, and Gkazi and to a lesser extent the tourist centre around Psirri,

Plaka, and Monastiraki. Other places with higher concentrations can be found along important

roads and metro lines – especially the green line which operates over ground – as well as the

other university campuses. Except for the innumerable amounts of little scribbles and slogans,

the most common techniques are stencil and freehand graffiti – each represent about one third

of the artworks that I took photos of. Paste-ups and posters are another popular medium,

followed by larger murals and works using paint and brush. In contrast to other cities,

especially the surprisingly insignificant amount of stickers in Athens is surprising; so is the

number of works using more unconventional materials such as wood, beads or tiles. Also the

form that the works take is quite specific. In figurative artworks human form and realism

represent the overwhelming majority as opposed to more abstract forms of depiction –

animals, comic style characters, objects and the like. As for text-based works, of which I only

managed to record a small amount, most are written in Greek and of quite complex character,

referring to popular culture or historical vocabularies5. A considerable amount is written in

English, other languages only surface rarely.

In contrast with other European capitals, the legal situation is much less unambiguous. Even

though there is jurisdiction about the damage of private property, it is not implemented very

vigorously. Many of the artists that I got to know told me stories about being caught painting

or spraying by police without any consequences. Yet, doing explicitly political street art or

slogan writing is considered much more dangerous and more likely to result in arrest or even

attacks on the street – since virtually all political artists are anarchists or antifascists they are

frequently attacked by neo-nazis. The people of Athens hold ambivalent opinions on their

5 For example, one popular quotation by Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis that resurfaces frequently on the walls

of Athens – often modified – is I don’t believe in anything. I don’t hope for anything. I’m free.

31

colorful walls. Young and politically left-leaning people tend to hold relaxed and open

attitudes toward street art. They often follow actively what is happening on the walls around

them and relate emotionally to specific artworks in their neighborhoods.

Here in Athens when you are painting in the street a lot of people come to you and tell you:

very good, I like it a lot, there’s people that say thank you for doing this and this is crazy in

my mind! Because in Barcelona if they see you’re painting, they just call the police you know

[…] And I am very grateful when somebody comes to you and says thank you for what you’re

doing because I will pass every day through here, this is my way home and this thing that

you are doing will come into my life. And this is crazy! I mean for me it’s the best regard

you can have, for sure (Interview with Gall d’Indie, 9 April 2013).

At the same time they often question the legitimacy of more confrontational forms such as

tagging and graffiti writing. Still, the majority of the Athenians are most likely to dismiss all

forms of street art as a criminal act of vandalism and a contribution to the general physical

deterioration of the city.

Some people like it and some people don’t. Some people get me something to eat while I’m

working and some people call the police. Everything is possible when you are painting out in

the streets (Interview with Cacaorocks, July 2013).

Generally there is an understanding, that the Athens street art scene is one of the most

upcoming ones in all of Europe and it has been receiving specific attention regarding its

connections with the crisis, which has repeatedly been a topic in international media as big as

The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Guardian or ZDF.

5.2. THE INFLUENCE OF THE CRISIS

It is quite obvious that the current boom in both quantity and quality of street art in Athens

has a lot to do with the situation of crisis. For one, due to an increasing lack of capacities in

the public sector, artworks on the walls even of public buildings are not regularly removed or

painted over anymore. A very drastic illustration is the trilogy, a set of three neo-classical

buildings – the National Library, the Academy and the original Athens University – set along

the central Eleftheriou Venizelou street. Probably due to its specific location – the street

connects the central squares Syntagma and Omonoia and is thus an essential vein in

demonstrations – and high visibility the sides and pillars of the buildings have been a popular

site for slogan writing in the past years. Most of them are removed eventually but stay around

32

for considerable amounts of time. While I was in Athens the buildings were covered in

slogans all around (see Figure 4) and it appears that they have looked like this for at least a

year. So this specific deregulation means that artworks and slogans stay around longer and in

larger quantities, which simultaneously enables more of a dialogue to unfold on the walls.

Additionally artists can often work more freely and invest more time into their artworks. On a

more general level the transformations of the city in the course of the crisis produce an

abundance of surfaces that are potentially intriguing for artists, such as empty shop windows,

houses nailed shut, and abandoned construction sites. One argument that resurfaced in

multiple conversations and interviews is that the crisis itself stimulates artistic expression of

all kinds and released enormous potentials of creativity as well as a newfound appreciation for

art and culture.

And through all this crisis I think we all actually should feel lucky – in quotation marks –

because it makes us more creative. I was talking with lathos [another artist] yesterday and we

were talking exactly about that thing, we are creative now because if we were in a period that

everything is calm and nothing really happened…you know…we wouldn’t have the

motivation to express ourselves. It’s not a good situation to be in, I’m not saying that, but I

think it makes you creative (Interview with Refur, 9 April 2013).

I think people are more focused now on the simple things, not so much on the cars and style as

before. We had a period that lifestyle was really promoted in Greece because the government

told us we have a lot of money and we are doing the Olympic Games so at this time the

society, the media and the newspapers were very lifestyle with cars and pools and nice homes.

And now the people turn back to the basics. So art I think is something that…now I think

that people in Athens are more interested in, in art, in music, in the simple things, in the things

you don’t have to pay to have (Interview with Sonke, 10 June 2013).

The activity on the streets has only really started appearing in the density that is characteristic

of contemporary Athens since the events of December 2008. The riots that ensued after the

murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos mark the point where especially slogan writing started being

used as a systematic political strategy. In the words of French street artist Oré:

Figure 4 Two views of the Trilogy

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About aesthetic and political issues, the big difference is how, since the murder of Alexis by

the police in December 2008, graffiti and street art became like a weapon for the youth to

express what they feel about this society. And with the collapse of the economy, that matter

grows. I think the Greek scene is much more political than France, definitely

(Interview with Oré, June 2013).

So while the riots of 2008 and 2009 declined eventually, street art stayed around as a new

means of political expression. Simultaneously the political circumstances that gave birth to

this new idea of public expression, permanently shape the contents and forms that the public

expression takes, constituting a specific aesthetics of crisis as I will argue and elaborate upon

in the following chapter.

With the increasing media attention and popularity – mainly from abroad – the issue of crisis

street art has also produced quite a lot of controversy in the past few years. There is an idea

that ”if you do political graffiti now in Greece you will be very famous in a very short time”

(Interview with Sonke, 10 June 2013) which results in certain artists being accused of

commercialization and selling out. One of the artists most affected by this is bleeps, who has

achieved a considerable level of fame with his often crisis-themed artworks. As a result his

works are being vandalized and destroyed extensively, often including anarchist messages –

he is frequently accused of representing political messages too soft – or sentences such as you

are not banksy6. The latest confrontation in this matter has been provoked by a crisis street art

festival initiated by the Athens School of Fine Arts to which no local artists were invited. The

official justification was, that the local scene of Athens was largely anonymous and of

“dubious artistic value” (Absent 2013), which has been critiqued heavily by some of the

artists excluded. The connections between street art and crisis represent thus both a chance to

facilitate a discussion about the Greek situation that goes beyond the discourses disseminated

by mass media and politics as well as a potential source of internal conflict and exclusion.

5.3. THE ARTISTS

The number of currently active street artists in Athens can be estimated at around 40 –

excluding the ones that exclusively engage in graffiti writing. Beyond that, significant

6 Banksy is a British street artist, who is probably the most internationally known representative of the

movement with artworks selling at millions. The artist bleeps is often criticized for allegedly imitating both his

behavior – staying as anonymous as possible and releasing lengthy political statements about artworks – and

style.

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numbers of anonymous political activists, mainly from the strands of the antifascist, anarchist

and squatters communities, engage in extensive slogan writing. In fact, learning how to

handle a spray can, even if just for the sake of spreading the anarchy-a or the squatters-n

symbols, seems to be an integral part of the political socialization of teenagers. For those

activists, slogan writing does not constitute a distinct identity but is rather seen as a part of the

wider political struggle. The repetitive writing of simple, recurring slogans – kill fascists, we

are all immigrants, acab (acronym for all cops are bastards) – and recognizable symbols

often follows a logic of territorial marking. In the traditional anarchist neighborhood of

Exarcheia, for example, I doubt that there is a wall that does not bear the sign or symbol of

either anarchism or antifascism. Additionally, political writing is often more confrontational

than street art. Often highly visible graffiti slogans can be found on buildings of political and

economic meaning, as on the trilogy, monuments, bank branches or shop windows, especially

along the three main streets for demonstrations and marches. Even a few of the people now

established in the formalized art world picked up the spray can for the first time as anarchist

teenagers. However, most of them stay invisible so that all that can be assumes about these

slogan writers is that they are representative of the movements they form a part of: under 25,

most likely still in their teens and male.

Figure 5 Welcome to Athens, artwork by WD in Exarcheia

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Unsurprisingly, the Athens street art scene – the community of people that refer to themselves

as street artists and are currently active – does not look all that different. The overwhelming

majority are male, even though there are a handful of established and respected female artists,

and not older than 35. Among them there is an equally great deal of collaboration and

conflict, usually of private nature. A small group of artists has been active since the early

1990s, but most of the other ones have only started in the past seven years. As for their

professional and economic backgrounds there is a rather wide dispersion. Some manage to

support themselves working as artists, some have quite plain daytime jobs or study, and others

are unemployed trying to make ends meet by taking smaller jobs. The majority comes from an

educated middle-class background but is currently in a more or less precarious situation.

When it comes to artistic influences, many state that comic books, graphic design, art, and

illustration have played a big role for them, mostly in a mixture of international and Greek

origins. Frequently international study and work experiences brought the artists in contact

with street art culture elsewhere – mainly Great Britain and the USA – and inspired them to

get involved themselves.

The prior motivation to do street art uniting all of the actors is the desire to public expression.

Yet, while for some of them, usually the ones associated with art in a more general sense, this

means the expression and exploration of individual feelings others are rather interested in

sharing political opinions or concerns about the social situation. The majority will agree that

the practice of street art as a whole has a political significance, but especially the art-related

ones often reject political groups and ideologies and did not wish to be associated with them.

This is probably to be attributed to the notorious character of political groups in Greece,

which are thought to be rather dogmatic and one-dimensional. Still they commonly address

socio-political issues such as art student STMTS who “want[s] to highlight to the people the

rights of the kids that they should have and how their lives are affected by the decisions and

actions of the big people” with his large scale paste-ups of children. Another artist describes

his aesthetic politics as follows:

All graffiti and street art is a political action and an effort for communication. Some artists try

to do propaganda with their work and I’m not one of them, I just try to change our

environment and the city landscape. I try to do it without the permission of the authorities and

of course by breaking some rules. My work is more like telling a story without trying to

change the ideas of the spectators if this is possible. I just want to make them feel other things

than just waking by a grey wall in the city (Interview with Cacaorocks, July 2013).

36

Besides this approach, there is another

group of artists that is highly

politicized and openly considers their

work as such. Despite not being

permanently active members in

political groups, those artists solidarize

and associate themselves with the

anarchist and antifascist cause and aim

to support it the best way they can. The

artworks they produce often send out

clear political messages and are meant

to form a sort of counter-propaganda

undermining dominant political and

media discourses. An example for this

is the issue of the κουκουλοφόροι

(hoodie-wearers) which have become

the symbolic emblem of the deviant

urban rioter in media and politics – up

to even a factual criminalization and likening to terrorists. Some artworks try to subvert this

discourse in an ironic way or by redefining the responsibility for the extensive riots in the past

five years as responses to political decision making. A frequent slogan states the state is the

only terrorist while a more elaborate work by political artist Pol shows the face of a

κουκουλοφόρος and the words the real terrorism is the eight o’clock news. Artist bleeps took

a more ironic approach to the subject in a work where a woman kisses a man in a suit, but

behind his back holds the hand of a hoodie-wearer. The artwork is captioned girls love

hoodies. Other topics that can frequently be found in political street art are social justice,

antifascism, consumerism, the right to the city, surveillance and militarization, protest and

riots in general as well as media critique. The participation in demonstration and direct actions

has a formative effect on many of those artists, as stencilist Mapet describes:

The 2008 riots gave me a boost because at the time I participated many squats, actions,

assemblies and stuff so I was, I spent many hours of my time there so I had more ideas, I

became more politicized, all of this with the anarchists mostly, so I produced more stuff

(Interview with Mapet, 4 April 2013).

Figure 6 My Spraycan, Your Molotov, artwork by Noir

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At times this involvement also resulted in workshops, for example to teach activist in squat

projects how to make their own stencils. When asked about the influence the crisis has had on

their work as street artists, most artists talk about being influenced by the current situation in

both direct and indirect ways but often reject the notion of the crisis as represented on

political and media discourses. Mapet calls the crisis a brand name, while artist D! rejects the

idea of crisis as a whole:

Firstly I'd like to clarify Greece is not having the so called "crisis". The word denotes an

unplanned situation that can often be out of control and against the will of those who handle it,

often a truly unexpected situation. The situation in Greece is planned and controlled by

state officials who pretend to be incapable of handling what they present as the "crisis". You

have to be very naive to believe what the political parties tell the media to tell the world, I

believe in facts, not in irrational press releases and absurd statements. The correct "word" for

what happens here is Gradual Degradation Scheme of Greece or GDSG

(Interview with D!, June 2013).

Figure 7 At times even the municipality of Athens emerges as a commissioner of street art, as in the case of this mural near Omonoia square

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6. AESTHETICS OF CRISIS

So far I have described street art as a meaningful urban practice appropriating urban space in

a claim to the right of the city and elaborated upon that connection in a more general

theoretical context as well as the particular example of Athens. Furthermore I have outlined

how the crisis fundamentally reinforces this dynamic and transforms not only the city of

Athens but also the critical practices of urban activism enacted within her – including street

art. The following chapter is now supposed to examine what I term aesthetics of crisis, the

qualitative transformations of iconography and forms of expression brought about in the

context of the crisis. Aesthetics herein denotes not a normative judgment of the visual

representation of the city, but the sum of the sensory and symbolic qualities of the artworks

and their relationship with the material and mental landscapes of crisis as a whole. While the

following analysis is exclusively concerned with street art, the aesthetics of crisis potentially

include all material and visual changes that occur within the context of the crisis: abandoned

and decaying houses, riot police, homeless. The underlying logic is to approach, explore and

come to know the crisis through its manifestations. Attempting to clarify the analytical

properties of this approach, I propose three aesthetic clusters that came to evolve prominently

out of my research: crisis, everyday life under crisis, and protest aesthetics. All three overlap

in multiple ways and are certainly not meant to be fixed or exhaustive. However, they do all

exhibit specific symbolic and iconographic vocabularies which will be described and

contextualized in the following analyses.

6.1. CRISIS

In contrast to the next section which will deal with artistic renderings of the broader

repercussions of the crisis as a lived reality, this analysis deals with artworks that reference

the crisis is a much more direct way. They reference specific institutions, political figures and

discourses of the crisis and engage with them. The number of artworks that actually fit that

margin is relatively small, amounting to only 36 out of the 850 photos of my archive. They

can be found all over town with no particular point of concentration. Similarly they are

displayed with all artistic techniques and take all stylistic forms. The most frequently used

references are the EU – often in the € symbol or the characteristic yellow stars of the flag –

39

and the faces of different Greek politicians and public figures such as current prime minister

Antonis Samaras or former Athens mayor Nikitas Kaklamanis. Occasionally artworks

incorporate the Greek flag, refer to international institutions such as the IMF, or revolve

around the very word crisis. The tone underlying the consistently negative depictions of crisis

is always either dystopian or ironic. Even though as an aesthetic cluster the images directly

engaging with the crisis are perhaps the least cohesive, there are two often recurring symbolic

discourses and strategies within: the subversive linguistic manipulation of terms, and the use

of a pictorial vocabulary quoting from imaginations of ancient Greece. There are countless

examples for the first tendency: a large depiction of the IMF logo lined with the words

irrational monetary fund in a pedestrian street in Exarcheia, a recurring stencil just plainly

stating catastroika or a paste-up of a coin, modeled after the Greek version of the Euro,

saying ελευθερία, freedom. What these

works share is a deep mistrust in the

institutions involved in managing the

crisis in Greece. Instead of just

accepting them as the given partners of

cooperation the artists conceive and

represent them as part of the crisis and

its repercussions. The messages

entailed are accordingly communicated

in a simple and direct manner. A more

complex artwork that also utilizes this

kind of wordplay can be seen in Figure

8. In it a woman in a striped blue dress

holds a sign stating No Euro, No

Vision, evoking at the same time a

reference to the European

entertainment spectacle of the

Eurovision Song Contest – which was

in fact hosted by Athens in the year

2006 – and a criticism of the lack of creativity in dealing with the crisis which is hardly ever

discussed publicly without the overpowering frame of reference of the European Union. This

is further reverberated in the bits of ancient Greek foot and leg wear the woman sports,

perhaps in a hint towards the dynamics of crypto-colonialism. Other works by the same artist

Figure 8 No Euro No Vision, artwork in Omonoia by bleeps

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cite this symbolism even more openly, as in a depiction of an ancient Greek statue holding up

a sign that reads we are not asking for your help, we can manage on our own.

The direct depictions of the crisis that have been described here, in many cases actually rather

reinforce than subvert the popular narratives about the crisis circulating through mass media

and most political spectrums. However, the small number of artworks with a very direct link

to the institutions generally considered responsible for the recent situation is remarkable in

comparison with the large amount of pieces dealing with the crisis as a lived reality. Thus, the

crisis is experienced and processed most intensively in its human consequences rather than the

associated political and economic institutions.

6.2. EVERYDAY LIFE UNDER CRISIS

Representing 241 out of 850 photographs, depictions of everyday life under crisis are by far

more common than direct engagements with the crisis. Spread all over the neighborhoods of

the city, these works are quite often paste-ups of drawings or hand-painted murals suggesting

a more personal and artistic character. The overwhelming majority of artworks display

realistic and expressive portrayals of human form, occasionally in the form of skulls and

bones. One important exception represents the crisis tag βασανίζομαι, meaning I am

tormented, that can be found written all over the city in all sizes and styles imaginable. The

walls of Athens are covered in faces and bodies bruised and broken by the crisis and its

austerity imperative, pale faces with hollow cheeks and tired eyes in expressions of fear and

despair, emaciated bodies hanging flaccidly in urban space. Often these bodies and faces

belong to children and young adults, who are thereby constructed as the ones most affected by

the consequences of austerity and crisis. A sequential series of paste-ups created by the artist

Dimitris Taxis entitled Things still aren’t alright powerfully illustrates this tendency. The

paintings pasted to the walls of different neighborhoods show young boys that despite their

bodies bear no signs of childhood but instead hold on to guns in terror, hide away in tree logs,

or sit motionless in between huge stacks of books. The displacement of temporalities seems to

play a crucial role, particularly in the last artwork. Socrates, Plato and Democracy is written

on the spines of the book stack he is sitting on, the ones pressing on him from the top read

Athens means Luxury, No Future, and Survival Guide. The hunched boy is stuck in time

between past and present with, literally, no future in sight, evoking a feeling of standstill that

41

Athenians express quite often in crisis-related conversations. A similar symbolism can be

found in another series of pasted drawings by WD. Faceless people of all kinds – men with

hats, children, and mothers – are captured in a moment of liminality. The wings on their backs

are broken, yet they still remain afloat in the air for the time being, the inevitable downfall

always present. One striking characteristic found in most artworks is the isolation of the

humans depicted, almost none of them showing larger groups in interaction. Similarly,

expressions of optimism or solidarity are rare. An exception can be found in the work of art

student STMTS, whose paste-ups of children show both the negative impacts of the crisis but

also elude a general sense of hope, the laughing faces of children becoming again beacons of

hope for the future.

In sum, the many artworks showing the everyday life under crisis represent the recent

situation not as a political or economic problem but as a lived reality with grave consequences

Figure 9 Paste-up series by Dimitris Taxis in Kerameikos and Exarcheia

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for the city’s population. The overwhelming majority emphasizes humanity in emotional

expression and physical vulnerability – frequently projected on the bodies and faces of

children and young adults. Depictions of skulls and wounded bodies further mark the crisis as

essentially a struggle of life and death. In their realistic portrayal of the humanitarian crisis

that Athens has been experiencing in the past three years they claim the walls of the city as a

space for emotionally processing the situation. Therein they undermine popular media

representations and political discourses externalizing the urban crisis by placing the blame for

it on certain groups of urban others7. In contrast, the related pieces of street art make visible

how universally the crisis permeates the life of every single inhabitant of the city. In fact, one

particular project even lays bare the wounds that have been inflicted on the very city of

Athens. The anonymous artist uses a virtual pen to draw attention to the cracks urban decay

and almost five years of intense protesting have left in the urban surface.

6.3. PROTEST AESTHETICS AND POLITICS

By far the largest amount of artworks on the walls of Athens relate to the aesthetics of protest

or display specific political statements, amounting to a total of 312 of 850 pictures.

Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of them can be found in the politicized neighbor-

hood of Exarcheia. The most frequent technique employed is stenciling, followed by freehand

graffiti and sprayed or painted slogans, proposing a slightly more aggressive stance on

reclaiming space. Stencils particularly enable a simple and quick repetition of an artwork or

slogan with a relatively small effort so that they prove particularly effective for spreading

political messages. Further they enable people with little artistic skill or patience to participate

in the street art scene as well. Tellingly, the three most productive stencil artists in Athens all

have explicitly political motivations. As for the form of expression, realistic depictions of

humans, abstract forms and text are evenly distributed. More than in any other aesthetic

cluster discussed here symbolic elements play a role, most prominently gas masks, molotov

cocktails, fists but also televisions and signs of specific social and political movements. A

7 In a very recent example, the exponentially increasing numbers in new HIV infections have been publicly

blamed on a small number of HIV positive sex workers by the police. Their pictures and names were posted on

the internet and reprinted by newspapers resulting in a public persecution of said women (McDonald-Gibson

2012). No connection, however, has been made here between the new statistics and the cancellation of a

formerly successful needle swap program as part of the austerity measures.

43

Figure 10 Protest Scene, artwork on Tsavela street in Exarcheia

large number of artworks depict either realistic scenes of protest – at times clearly referencing

certain photographs that have circulated prominently in mass media – or portraits of

protesters, their faces usually hidden behind gas masks or scarves. The depictions of protest

usually show larger groups of people marching in dynamic action carrying flags assigning

them to a certain group – as the antifascist action (antifa) in Figure 10 – and weapons like

stones and petrol bombs. The image of the burning city, either in depiction or in the slogan

Athens burns, recurs quite commonly. In contrast, the portraits of protesters are often rather

static and expressionless. In the case of the faceless masses of heads in gas masks that seem to

appear around every corner, the symbolism is meaningful on two levels. On the one hand they

relate to the actual reality of protest where a gas mask has become an obligatory accessory, on

the other hand they become emblematic of the increasing militarization, violence and social

polarization of the city. Both the depictions of scenes and actors transform the specific

temporality of protest as a momentary eruption of political sentiments by inscribing it into the

surface of the city. In this way protest is not only manifested and present around every corner

of the city, it becomes a part of it claiming urban space as a canvas for subversive political

practices. This fundamentally displaces the narrative disseminated by media and politics,

where protest particularly the riots they tend to turn into are externalized and attributed to a

44

disruptive group of mayhem-loving hoodie-wearers and anarchists. Generally the artworks

revolving around protest and politics hold a rather critical stance on mass media – some of the

artists even explicitly name counter-propaganda as their motivation – which at times even

becomes the central topic of concern. Usually juxtaposed with simple depictions of television

sets, they read slogans such as the television will not be revolutionized or bash it. A small yet

notable number of the protest-related artworks examine a completely different aspect:

romance. As I was told by several people the long hours of standing around waiting for a

protest to take off are quite popularly used by participants to approach one another. The walls

of the city bear testimony to this romantic potentiality of political action with phrases like

anarchy is for lovers or as the fires burn our hearts will unite. The depictions, however, are

often permeated by a kind of machismo that is unfortunately peculiar to the political left

(Korizi 2012).

Figure 11 Artwork by ScarrOne in Exarcheia Figure 12 A typical gasmask character by Sidron and NDA

Though some of the politicized artworks stand for themselves, a large amount is clearly

associated with political and social groups. Most frequently this association is with the

anarchists, the antifascist action, and the squatters’ movement. The messages are often quite

simple, promoting solidarity – e.g. with migrants or threatened squats – and resistance – e.g.

against authority, police, capitalism, nationalism and fascism.

45

7. CONCLUDING REMARKS AND PROSPECTS

The question posed at the beginning of this paper was: how is the current situation of crisis

reflected on the walls of Athens. Answering that question proves that the engagements with

the crisis found in street art are just as complex as the crisis itself. First of all, the artworks

found in Athens deal with the crisis as an empirical situation – the social crisis, the crisis of

political representation, as well as the crisis of capitalist accumulation. The emphasis herein

lies on the crisis as a lived reality and social transformation, referring to the human

consequences of the imposed austerity imperative. By privileging the experience of everyday

life as the primary frame of reference to the crisis, artists undermine the discourses

disseminated by mass media and politics which bias political and economic perspectives.

Here the social crisis, especially in its manifestations in Athens, are not discussed as

consequences of political decision making but rather externalized and blamed on specific

populations. Consequently, most artists understand the crisis as an issue of interpretation and

hold very critical positions on public representations. Some even consciously aim to

undermine them through their artworks. Yet, even the many artworks whose content is not

directly related to any aspect of the crisis contribute to a more general project of reclaiming

the city as a lived space for its inhabitants. The walls of Athens are claimed as a democratic

medium of communication, expression and subversive political speech – both on an

individual and a collective level. Whether the actual artwork follows a logic of confrontation

or beautification, dialogue or propaganda, it encourages the passersby to engage with their

surroundings and to consider certain power relations inscribed in them. Additionally, the

walls of Athens provide a variety of insights about the social movements and political groups

strategically claiming them. The density of slogans and certain signs may indicate politically

meaningful spaces and territories, whereas more figurative works reflect certain internal

logics such as a tendency of sexism.

Yet, what has been discussed in the previous chapters can necessarily only represent a small

share of the complex thematic field constituted by the variables street art, Athens and crisis.

Some aspects such as the many written slogans or the anonymous crowd of political writers

were at this point simply impervious, whereas others could not be explored due to the spatial

limitations of this paper. These include the specific experience of female artists, the

motivations of street art tourism – non-Greek artists that travel to Athens to paint there – and

the global circulation of images of crisis street art from Athens. An exploration of

46

photographic archives that document the urban political struggles of the past century may

furthermore enable a historical understanding of the tradition of political slogan writing in

Athens. I thus thoroughly believe that this topic still holds much potential for further research.

During the winter that I spent in Athens, the general atmosphere was rather calm with only the

eviction of Villa Amalias – the oldest squat in Athens – and a number of physical attacks on

migrants causing concentrated peaks of tension. While those events did leave visible traces on

the walls, they did not transform the urban landscape as the large demonstrations, general

strikes and riots of 2008 and 2011 did. Being present during an equally strong movement –

and with thousands of employees of the public sector to be let go this month and the death of

Alexis Grigoropoulos having its fifth anniversary in December it is not unlikely for one to

emerge soon – would enable a much deeper analysis of the actual interplay of street art and

political protest. Another promising perspective lies in the comparison with other

metropolises of crisis, both in the very literal European context as well as beyond. As for the

former one might investigate other Mediterranean crisis and austerity cities such as Lisbon or

Madrid. Recent events, however, suggest that there are actually stronger parallels to be found

within the very region of the South-East margin of Europe, most prominently in the protest

waves that have shaken up Sofia and Istanbul. Specifically the crisis revolving around the

Occupy Gezi protests and its adaption in street art display a variety of similarities with

Athens, particularly the events after December 2008.Investigating further into any of these

connections will not only potentially sharpen an understanding of how street art works as a

means of protest and social movements but also open new perspectives through which to read

the complex issue of the crisis.

47

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