Signs of a crisis: seeking new formulas for understanding and preserving Athens cityscape’s imagery of crisis

Abstract

Following on from the inroads the advancement of new technologies has made into the study of urban landscapes, this article set out to examine the visualised activities over the surfaces of the Greek capital, Athens, during Greece’s econom- ic crisis. The contemporary detritus of the recession – walls, massive closed stores and their shopfronts, carcasses of kiosks and various urban volumes – has been gradually transformed into a skeleton, an armature where socio-political echoes come into existence through an inscriptive, adding and mark-making process. Taking into consideration that this alternative narrative of the crisis through the public surfaces has been perpetuated, comprising a visually saturated and omnipresent skin, new for- mulas can emerge and seek out an understanding and preserv- ing this imagery. An attempt to seek these formulas is primarily based on fieldworks in Athens in various chronological phases during the crisis, observation and wandering, as well as photo- graphic charting, archiving and scanning methodologies. The employed apparatuses indicate how novel approaches to new technologies may evidence twofold significance: on the one hand, how they can contribute to an alternative “reading” of the traces, while moving along their frequent reception as “acts of vandalism”, stains or smudges; on the other, how the scientific progression, e.g. 3D scanning, in terms of recording and image making, can be enriched, become widely used, and provide new perspectives in the field of urban landscape and its study. The resulted body of this project can be applied to the direction of a chronicle; a historic evidence identifying the crisis and Greece’s contemporary period. This approach has the potential to reveal new insights into a wider context of activities surrounding the urban visual interventions. Besides, it may finally be applied as a methodology to other cases of cityscapes similar to Athens or responding to their particularities.

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