De-mapping Athens as a City in Crisis.

Abstract

This thesis engages in the socio-political and spatial-geographical realities of Athens in the context of a specific period of economic crisis, through a temporal visual reading of the city’s surfaces. The overwritten surfaces of Athens during the past couple of decades offer a rich variety of ‘traces’ that emerge from human interactions with the everyday urban environment. Indeed, the public spaces accommodate and reflect the human echo, transforming the urban sphere into a narrative of the current Greek socio-political context. Slogans, visual and textual representations, graffiti and street art, posters, stickers, and paper mass, all demonstrate a relentless persistence and incessant appearance in the contemporary city. Although an urban writing activity was, in fact, noticeable before 2008 (when the crisis is considered to be started), since then Athens has gradually laid bare a phenomenon of overmarking activity over its surfaces, thereby speaking of a different surface or layer of the city. This new reality has concealed the architectural city structures to such an extent that we may argue that a derma, a skin has appeared. Although considerable scholarly research has undertaken studies on Athenian urban activity, it is mostly focused on graffiti, slogans, and street art, covering the subject partly through the linguistic and artistic forms—mere components of the new reality.
The current thesis also attempts to examine the ‘general picture’, the new urban imagery of Athens as a phenomenon arising from the crisis. A profound tapestry that comprises all the embedded elements (the anonymous trace, the unwittingly made, the non-artistic, etc.) as a unity, a skin, beyond any artistic or linguistic connotations. This research aims to discuss and reimagine the skin as a contested space of socio-political reading and understanding the crisis through an alternative narrative of Greece’s contemporary history, visualised on the city’s surfaces. As a derma that succeeds to visualise socio-political history, a surprising emergency to preserve this historic evidence rises and lies in the fact that the official authorities, such as the mayor of Athens, have proceeded to a decisive strategy for a ‘clean city’, vanishing the traces, and, unbeknownst to him and the authorities, thus getting involved in the development of this skin.
In this thesis, I attempt to promote the skin’s controversial and ambitious nature, but also its dominant and omnipresent existence. I also attempt to show that it can function as an apparatus and driving force for contemporary art approaches. This approach will be examined through theoretical tools such as collage, a subversive formula of providing co- existence to promiscuous elements, décollage, a methodology of retrieving past layers of the crisis’s evolution, and various bibliographies on graffiti, street art, the urban space as contested space, etc. Also, as practice-based research, I initially engage with periodical fieldwork in Athens, photographic documentation and archiving, mapping, and printing. Central to the practice element is the utilization of novel approaches to expanding the field of print, relying on 3D visualisation software used in documenting the cityscape.
To bring this project to completion, the adopted theoretical approaches from the aforementioned fields of fine art are used to enable the Athenian urban imagery to be seen through a new perspective of a unique ‘skin of crisis’. The developed practice of wandering, collecting data, and utilising it on maps and print, is promoted as a way to contribute to potential knowledge as a visual production body of methodology. The derma is the one of a snake that is reborn and reshaped, through socio-political and sociocultural adversity. Its study is shown to be of great importance for the heritage of a city with an immense backbone of historical heritage (Athens), giving way to a novel field research activity to reveal the societal voice through studying the derma of the city.
Keywords: Athens; economic crisis; mapping; collage; skin; cityscape; photography; photogrammetry; printmaking; 3D scanning.

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