Political Graffiti in Critical Times

The Aesthetics of Street Politics

Ricardo Campos, Yiannis Zaimakis, Andrea Pavoni, Ricardo Campos, Yiannis Zaimakis, Andrea Pavoni

• Editorial: Berghahn Books
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789209426
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: Art General

Whether aesthetically or politically inspired, graffiti is among the oldest forms of expression in human history, one that becomes especially significant during periods of social and political upheaval. With a particular focus on the demographic, ecological, and economic crises of today, this volume provides a wide-ranging exploration of urban space and visual protest. Assembling case studies that cover topics such as gentrification in Cyprus, the convulsions of post-independence East Timor, and opposition to Donald Trump in the American capital, it reveals the diverse ways in which street artists challenge existing social orders and reimagine urban landscapes.

Part I

Street Activism and Visual Protest in Contemporary Cities

Chapter 1

A Periegesis through the Greek Crisis in Five Graffiti Acts

Cartographic and Photographic Dialogues

Konstantinos Avramidis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi

This chapter takes the form of a dialogue between the authors: one a graffiti practitioner and an architectural designer who is interested in writing in space and how we write about writing in space (Konstantinos), and a sociologist and photographer who investigates different forms of visual markers on urban walls and is interested in the subversive politics behind graffiti and street art (Myrto). More specifically, it is a dialogue between: (a) the means that the two authors use as their key research modes in their respective disciplines: cartographic drawing and photographic documentation; (b) the different ways that graffiti and street art have disciplined them to view and research urban environments; and (c) the border-crossing experience as practitioners/insiders and researchers/outsiders of the graffiti and street art scene in Athens. As such, the multiple aspects of our identities both as insiders of the graffiti and street art scene in Athens, and at the same time as scholars researching the scene from the outside, provide valuable tools with which we unpack the multiple and contradictory narratives of practising, researching and teaching graffiti and street art in times of crisis. In particular, we are interested in the ways we shape knowledge and the tension between the epistemological and the ontological ways of knowing, seeing and sensing the city through graffiti and street art practices. In other words, by moving from praxis to theory and back, we are attempting to reconcile the problem of knowing, and the problem of being part of, a specific cultural practice (Avramidis and Tsilimpounidi 2017).

This work sprang from an urban walk that the authors were asked to prepare in the context of a Masters’ students field trip to Athens.¹ The purpose of this walk was distinctly different from street art tours that make a profit from the art on the streets, reduce walking to prescribed routes and restricting the conversation to particular pieces and topics (Bengtsen 2014; Young 2016; Andron 2018). Contrary to street art tours that build an image of authenticity, locality and authority to promote their product to tourists (cf. Ioannides, Leventis and Petridou 2016), we do not consider ourselves as the knowledgeable subjects who share their expertise. This does not mean, however, that there are no ‘curatorial’ decisions made. What we hope to avoid is to ‘aestheticise transgression’ (Campos 2015) and to make ourselves part of an economy that contributes to the depoliticization of our walls, streets and squares. The walk was limited to the district of Exarchia² – an area in Athens city centre saturated with graffiti, known as the stronghold of the anti-authoritarian movement – and had five stops in front of key graffiti pieces that we consider characteristic. When studied together, they are able to offer a comprehensive – albeit subjective and partial – narrative of the Greek crisis. In what follows we first provide a short account of crisis and its manifestations on Athenian walls, then we move into a discussion of the chosen method of periegesis in order to carve the way for the five acts presented in this chapter.

Crisis of Representation and Representations of Crisis

Is there such thing as the Greek crisis? And if so, what crisis and whose crisis is it? Post-2008, the word ‘crisis’ has been introduced in our lives with a clear reference to the financial stagnation and economic impoverishment of certain strands of the European populace. The European periphery, and Greece in particular, have been characterized as the epicentres of this ‘crisis’. For many thinkers (Harvey 2012), what distinguishes the post-2008 crisis from other historical examples of financial shocks and instabilities is its relation to a particular model of urban growth. Globalization and the concomitant flows of populace to urban areas mean that the biggest proportion of people nowadays live in cities. Yet, as Andy Merrifield (2014) suggests, this incessant expert hype about exploding urban populations is closer to a type of Malthusian fear-mongering that obfuscates the class and power questions surrounding our current urban conditions. Historically, this is not the first time we have witnessed the relationship between the increased investment in urban areas and the explosion of financial bubbles able to shake the foundation of the global economy. The difference now is the reference to a particular neoliberal model of urban life. According to Laura Burkhalter and Manuel Castells (2009), the urban crisis has much deeper implications and social effects, such as the deterioration of everyday life, the rise of fear and the concomitant culture of violence and mistrust, and as a result, urban space has been abandoned to the dynamics of real estate. Moreover, cities are the central stages of the expression of civic reactions against the crisis and the resulting austerity policies. As Merrifield suggests, these kinds of civic reactions are ‘contesting our hyper-exploitative undemocratic system of global urbanism’ (Merrifield 2014: ix).

Athens had it all: patterns of uneven but spectacular development related to the hosting of the Olympic Games; real estate and Airbnb bubbles; xenophobic fear-mongering; and last but not least, fierce, massive and explosive patterns and tactics of resistance to austerity, racism and exploitation, to name a few. More recently, in the summer of 2015, Athens became the epicentre of another European ‘crisis’ – what was called the refugee crisis of Europe – and was characterized as the ‘entrance gate to Europe’ and managed as the European hotspot of Fortress Europe (Carastathis, Spathopoulou and Tsilimpounidi 2018). In other words, Athens has been the epicentre of two concomitant crises, or as Anna Carastathis argues, the place of ‘intersecting, nesting crises’ (Carastathis 2017). In this context, we witness a crisis of representation of particular groups in the public realm. The representations of crisis, such as those in the graffiti studied here, come as responses to the crisis of representation. We have theorized the rhetorical tropes, etymological schemas and after-effects of the notion of crisis elsewhere (Tsilimpounidi 2017), yet in this chapter we want to focus on its urban manifestations on the Athenian city walls.

Street art and wall writing is hardly a new phenomenon in Athens. A short walk in the city centre reveals writings on ancient columns, poems on marble signs, and names and quotations of ancient philosophers on marble monuments, with some of the inscriptions going back to classical antiquity. Next to the ancient ruins lie the modern ruins of the crisis. Given that the current layers of the city intersect with the old city centre, the passer-by experiences a visual bombing of ancient inscriptions, Byzantine signs and contemporary graffiti and slogan writing. As graffiti historian Orestis Pangalos (2014) and anthropologist Pausanias Karathanasis (2014) suggest, there was a proliferation of graffiti and street art even before the crisis in Athens, which intensified during the first crisis for two reasons: firstly, because it is very expensive and difficult for the municipality to sustain an active anti-graffiti programme, as the funds needed for that cannot be found in the era of financial austerity; and secondly, because both crises – the financial and the refugee – experienced by Greece were quickly transformed into a political and social crisis in which marginal groups of the population were silenced by the mainstream media. Simultaneously, protests and uprisings resulted in the creation of a highly politicized public. Thus, more people were participating in political street art, graffiti and slogan writing as one more means of autonomous expression and reclamation of public space.

Graffiti in the Athens of memoranda has been studied through various means and disciplines. Mainly through ethnographic studies, sociologists explore graffiti as a visual indicator and product of social change as well as a means of resistance in an urban environment characterized by rapid degradation, or else they see it as a counter-hegemonic response to the crisis (Tsilimpounidi and Walsh 2011; Zaimakis 2015; Tsilimpounidi 2015a). Literature and linguistics analyses focus on the role of language in recent graffiti production (Boletsi 2016; Stampoulidis 2016), while visual culture scholars address issues related to urban aesthetics (Kim and Flores 2017; Tulke 2017). Architects have approached the subject focusing on the urban processes that affect graffiti (Leventis 2013; Stavrides 2017), map the places where writings acquire particular meanings (Avramidis 2012, 2014a) or, by design means, attempt to decipher and narrate the spatial, social and material conditions in which graffiti signify (Avramidis 2015, 2019, 2020a, 2020b; Leventis 2017).

Building upon the aforementioned works, and in order to (a) navigate through the deeply performative, situated and embodied practices of graffiti and street art, (b) map the social, political and urban context of Athens, and (c) transcend discursive borders between social sciences and the arts, we introduce the notion ‘periegesis’. This concept has a long association with travellers, and has had a particular meaning in the context of Athens since ancient times. The word periegesis (< peri- ‘around’ + hegesis ‘lead’) means ‘the act of showing around’, denoting a tour and a geographical description. As such, it connotes movement. This sense of movement – whether this is a movement from one site to another or in and through a particular site – we attempt to capture through cartographic and photographic gestures. The way each site is described and/or (re)presented is a demonstration of our understanding of it.

Of course, we never complete the whole picture of ‘Athenian crisis graffiti’ because we are dealing with only five situations, but we are going to show how they can be interconnected through history and place, which are key in the understanding of each situation. As we have argued elsewhere (Avramidis 2018), the situation is the context in which graffiti is undertaken as well as the action of graffiti itself, the timeframe within it. This is the reason why we talk about five ‘acts’ of graffiti, referring to the time and space, action and context of the gesture of writing.

Figure 1.1 Periegesis map: A square kilometre in Athens city centre. © Konstantinos Avramidis, 2018.

A Map of the Periegesis and a Periegesis through our Mappings

As is evident in the etymology of the Greek word theoria, theory is the establishment of a point of view; it involves the act of looking from a particular place, and from there making a leap into analysis of the wider interrelationships of events. If, as John Berger (1977) famously stated, seeing comes before words, then there is a fundamental connection between visualization and our being in the world. However, our ways of seeing are dependent not only on our positionality but also on the available discursive framings. The common denominator of ‘cartography’ (< carte ‘map’ + graphy ‘writing’) and ‘photography’ (< phos ‘light’ + graphy ‘writing’) is ‘graphy’, i.e. writing. This is also the etymological root of graffiti (cf. Avramidis 2014b). Another shared characteristic of cartography and photography is framing: they frame realities, include and exclude, and in the process transform the realities they represent whilst creating new realities. In other words, photography and cartography frame and are being framed by our thoughts and writing, and so this chapter is about frameworks and how frames work. In so doing, it engages with the framing of subjectivity and chance, exposing the circumstantial constraints that affect the situated nature of graffiti execution and perception (Avramidis 2014c).

Are the following framings an act of subjectivity and chance? And if so, what can we learn about chance and positionality in our urban explorations? The sequence of our documentation/periegesis might reveal not only temporal but also spatial correlations. The restrictions that physical elements impose (parked cars, trees, etc.) designate how we make the periegesis and record the pieces. These frames expose the situated nature of graffiti, street art, and urban scholarship. What is excluded from our frames might provide valuable information about what is included. In many instances, the absence of a focal point reveals the focus of the frame. To be more precise, we invoke a multimodality of framings in this paper: photographic frame, cartographic frame, the urban frames used by the artists, and the framing in academic writing and thought. In doing so, we want to challenge the borders between seeing, visualizing, imagining and writing.

This periegesis is framed as a dialogue between visual representations and social theories. In doing so, it attempts to treat them both as equal partners in the knowledge-producing process, and as such dissolves scientific over-reliance on text and numbers. Thus, it moves away from traditional approaches on visual methods that tend to treat photographs as another source of data. Rather, it is informed by the postmodern turn in visual studies (Knowles and Sweetman 2004; Pink 2013), in which the possibilities of the visual itself as empirical knowledge and critical text should inform our approaches and methodologies. To put it differently, the use of photography to construct visual aspects of events adds another dimension to the research sources, thus fighting the tendency to reduce all social phenomena into text. This approach by no means signifies a treatment of images as true representations of reality, but rather points towards the possibilities of multiple forms of portrayal of social realities. Cartography not only measures but remakes territories. James Corner (1999) claims that maps have agency due to their both ‘analogous and abstract’ nature. Their analogous character – having the ability to measure sites through geometric projection – makes them feel neutral. Yet, maps are always a result of a series of choices, such as framing, scaling, orientation, and so on. This abstractness, together with their analogous character, transforms maps into ‘operating tables’ where the cartographer ‘discovers new worlds within past and present ones’ (ibid.: 214). By collecting and combining seemingly unrelated elements, making new or breaking existing connections, and generally disrupting pre-existing spatial and temporal sequences, cartography reveals relationships and constructs reality anew.

Many years ago, Vilem Flusser stated that photographs ‘are meant to be maps, and they become screens’ (Flusser 1983: 10), meaning that in the beginning photography was supposed to act as a map that would introduce new worlds and provide navigation capacities to the ways we understand everyday life in these new worlds. According to Flusser, what ended up happening was th...