Welcome to the ruins: Street art in Athens
Street art is ubiquitous in Athens. Given a platform, what do the citizens of Athens have to say?
While wandering the streets of Athens, I wondered at the street art which covered almost every wall. A friend explained that few establishments have the money to re-paint the walls, so Athens’ streets have become a gallery for the thoughts of the city’s dwellers — until, that is, another artist takes over the space. There’s an overtly political nature to the city’s culture of street art, born in a time of economic crisis: now given a platform, what do the citizens of Athens have to say?
There is a story here that goes further than the socio-economic crisis the art reflects, something more pertinent to contemporary society. It’s a phenomenon that can tell us about urban living and urban space. About how space is constantly worked and re-worked by its dwellers and perhaps about what happens when space is more democratically owned — when the state and petite bourgeoisie cannot afford to protect its private wealth.
Urban Studies Professor Tsilimpounidi Myrto sees the streets of Athens as a “social diary” that provides a space to voice those voices unheard by the mainstream. For him, street art is a re-appropriation of the city. Looking at it this way, the facades of Athens’ buildings have become public property: an open-access notebook where often-conflicting political views are expressed, read and interacted with.
The walls are a new medium which don’t simply enclose private property from public walkways, but also have become a site for the cumulative, plural political and social imagination of urban dwellers. It is as if these walls and the street art adorning them are a new form of political representation, which perhaps offer potential ideas for new radical democracies that focus on direct rather than representative practice.
According to architect and academic Konstantinos Avramidis, different architectural forms inspire different forms of street art. Street artists often target neoclassical architecture, which is seen as a symbol of bourgeois urban identity — an ideal place to critique a democracy that enables injustice and unbridled capitalism.
In his paper ‘Reading an Instance of Contemporary Urban Iconoclash,’ Avramidis concludes: “Streets and building façades are sites where competing agents meet to articulate beliefs and negotiate supremacy… The ‘face’ of architecture is a place where beliefs are imposed and counter-beliefs are expressed.”
Clearly there are significant political dynamics between national bodies, buildings and street artists. The importance and impact of architectural style in the everyday should not be understated; different architectural aesthetics clearly have an affect on the way people feel, whether they live there or are just passing by. These aesthetics affect issues of ownership, identity, representation, community, and belonging. Property developers and owners, governments and architects thus have a social responsibility to be aware of this effect on contemporary urban life. They are not constructing an inert building — they are constructing the foundations upon which a social life will be built.
The aesthetic of a cityscape is inevitably going to shape the personal and collective identity of the people who live within it — is it fair, or even ethical, for this aesthetic to be imposed upon them with neither their input nor consent?
The street art in Athens, then, is more than just an attempt at ‘re-appropriating space’ — it’s a means by which to reform and re-articulate urban identity and belonging more broadly.
I learned from friends that street art is done predominantly by those who are well-educated and middle class in an attempt to bolster the volume and presence of their political views. Walking through Athens, it feels as if the semi-permanent defacement of buildings reworks the very nature of the streets themselves — you can’t help but feel political. The markings echo a new form of ownership, one from below. Those who disregard the state — such as the infamous anarchists of Athens — no longer pop up in ephemeral moments of political dissidence. Instead their political dissent is etched on the streets in the centre of the state’s capital.
Because of the street art, the way in which I saw the city took a drastic turn. I no longer thought of Athens as simply the ancient capital of Western civilisation — it had become far more interesting than that. The city now stood as testimony to the failure of capitalism and social democracy.
It is the very experience of walking around Athens — where anarchists have taken over a whole section of the city, where people shoot-up nonchalantly on the streets, where business owners cannot afford to protect their private wealth, where political campaigning is often militant and those who protect the state do so because it is the only profession available to them — that makes the failure of social democracy and capitalism so stark. There is literal anarchy. This is not to say the failure of social democracy has not been seen, or cannot be seen, elsewhere — it is just to say that in Athens, it is uniquely in your face. The irony of democracy’s failure in Athens is not lost on Greek people either — as they say: “democracy died in its birthplace”.
The image featured above is the view from the top of Athens’ new museum of modern art, built to nourish the city’s desperate ever hunger for tourism. From the museum, I had a perfect view of the Acropolis, Athens’ most visited site. Captured below, on an archetypically unfinished building project, a message is written in English for all the tourists to see: “Welcome and enjoy the ruins”. Athens houses the remains of two civilisations: that of the Ancient Greeks and that of the 21st century’s social democracy. Walking around the city and reading the writing on the walls is like conducting an archaeology of the contemporary — an archaeology of democracy and 21st century capitalism.
All photos: Rose Lasko-Skinner
