jgmc 5 (2) pp.

115–124 Intellect Limited 2019

Journal of Greek Media & Culture

Volume 5 Number 2
© 2019 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/jgmc.5.2.115_2

EDITORIAL

DIMITRIS PLANTZOS
National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

Athens remains; Still?

NOULA
marbles, marbles …. marbles everywhere! ….
I’m fed up with marble-dust, my tummy aches […] who gives a toss
about marbles! I wanted her, here, on these marbles, to polish them […]
so that she can see how I run, how I slide, how I look like her […] then
off to Monastiraki to get a coffee, then to the Hondos Center […] to buy
bras […] up Hermou Street then, at Zara […] in the crowd to buy mini-
skirts […] then go to Hell […] let us go to Hell then […] as long as she
comes; tell me is this too much to ask? […]

NANA
All this fuss for a stroll? […] and this house and our heritage you give
up for a bra? we inherited an entire Acropolis with a view […] we are
going to keep the name high like a banner, we the Daughters!
(Basdeki 2017, trans. D. Plantzos)

Sometime back in October 2017, theatregoers in Athens were treated to a

new production by bijoux de kant (an Athens-based theatre collective active
since 2010; see bijoux de kant 2019), titled The Daughters (Oi Kores; see
elculture.gr 2017; cf. Voudiklaris 2017). In the play, set in an  ‘archaeologi-
cal’ scenery of off-white classical marbles and dead flowers (cf. Figure 1) and
directed by Giannis Skourletis, we witness a spirited dialogue between two

www.intellectbooks.com  115
Dimitris Plantzos

1. In the night of 19
December 1980,
two emblematic
department stores
in Athens, Minion
and Katrantzos,
were destroyed by
simultaneous arson
attacks, most likely
attributable to
terrorism (though the
related investigations
were never resolved).
Some further attacks to
similar establishments
were to follow. The
two businesses were
temporarily moved
elsewhere, though
eventually they both
collapsed financially.
The sites of the two
original stores remain
in ruins to the present
day.

Figure 1:  Stage set for bijoux de kant’s production of The Daughters, October
2017. Photograph: Giannis Skourletis.

sisters – the ‘daughters’, called Nana and Noula, both named after their long-
gone mother, Athina/Athens. The two sisters alternate in  ‘playing mother’,
that is pretending to be their mother in dialogue with the other daughter – an
innovative revisiting of Jean Genet’s The Maids, though not just that: through
a sophisticatedly naïve text crafted by Glykeria Basdeki (2017), the play recites
well-known athenocentric poetry (from Byron to Palamas, Seferis and beyond),
interweaved with Basdeki’s own musings, in order to come to terms with the
city’s current predicament. In a desolate landscape of abandonment and loss,
the two women, at once modern and classical (note how in Modern Greek,
the word kores suggests both  ‘daughters’ and korai, the well-known marble
statues dedicated to the Acropolis in antiquity), undertake an idiosyncratic, as
well as painful Athenian archaeology as a way ‘to regain their freedom’, their
liberation from ‘closed doors and sealed windows’ (elculture.gr 2017).
In the delicate performance put together by Skourletis, the audience is
shown an all-too familiar Athenian topography: Athinas Street and Agias
Eirinis Square; the archaeological sites of the Acropolis and the Kerameikos;
Monastiraki and Ermou Street, with their coffee shops and department stores;
in addition to a typically Athenian material culture consisting of walks and
views, as well as prized (albeit now rather antiquated) heirlooms: according
to the play’s opening lines, the heroines’ dowry (one, we are assured, that
was duly preserved by mothballs – oi nafthalines) consists of  ‘Zolotas- and
Lalaounis jewellery, chatain fabrics from Tsouchlos, overpriced crepe de chines,
shawls by Filimon, authentic Balmains, Lanvins, and Balenciagas, backless
dresses by Kritsas, pure-wool demicoats from Minion before the fire’1 and so
on (Basdeki 2017). A city of bodies, sites and traumas; in short, a city that once
was a field of sights and wonders, now decidedly turning into a crisis-scape.
It is in this powerful performance by Giannis Skourletis and bijoux de kant,
as well as in a number of many other similar ventures of the last ten years or

116  Journal of Greek Media & Culture

 Athens remains; Still?

so (cf. Hager and Fragkou 2017), that much of the inspiration to publish this
special issue dedicated to Athens was drawn from, as I will outline below.
Classical Athens was celebrated by European classicism as  ‘the eye of
Greece, mother of arts and eloquence’, a charming city ‘of studious walks and
shades’ (Milton, Paradise Regained IV.5–8). As part of the neoclassical project,
in return, contemporary Athens became the nation’s capital and the focus of
much, though sometimes unwanted, international attention. Today, housing
roughly 40 per cent of the Greek population and more than half of foreign
immigrants and refugees residing in Greece, Athens and Attica form a chal-
lenging metropolis, thriving with urban energy, creativity and frustration. The
first two decades of the twenty-first century found Athens hosting the second
Modern Olympics in its history (after the inaugural event of 1896 and a failed
attempt at hosting the Games for 1996), then having to come to terms with a
violent economic, political and social crisis, still in motion. As the city is strug-
gling with the long-term effects of a prolonged recession, the collapse of tradi-
tional economic practices, and the challenges for social cohesion posed by
neo-liberal politics of austerity and surveillance, we are in need of a rethinking
of Athens in its present state of precarity.
In this, we follow in the footsteps of Jacques Derrida who, during his
much-discussed visit to Athens in the mid-1990s, famously reflected on ‘the
luminous memory of Athens’ and ‘its phenomenal archive’ (Derrida 2010: 29).
Originally titled ‘Demeure, Athènes’, the essay speaks of the city as a place of
residence – someone’s address – as well as a site that persists in our collec-
tive imaginary as a lieu de memoire – a city that ‘addresses’ its own visitor so
to speak. In Derrida’s essay, Athens is portrayed as a site of timeless images,
rediscovered memories and profound mourning; a ‘departed’ city, an ‘Athens
that is no longer in Athens’ (Derrida 2010: 6), that inspires its visitor (or the
person who actually resides or remains in it) to reflect on his/her own mortal-
ity and this persisting state of ‘mourning that keeps within itself what it loses
in the keeping’ (Derrida 2010: 47). What is at the same time lost and kept
is, in the words of Vassiliki Kolocotroni who recently revisited Derrida’s essay
in parallel with Martin Heidegger’s Sojourns, both the  ‘preserved memory’
and  ‘the privileged procedure of preservation itself’ (Kolocotroni 2018: 36).
And as cultural gestures such as bijoux de kant’s play mentioned above, or as
those discussed in the essays that follow show, this procedure of preservation
involves both an archaeology of memory as well as its topography: as Derrida
strolls around Athens, chasing  ‘the divine play of shadow and light’,  ‘in
the Kerameikos Cemetery, in the Agora, the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the
Adrianou Street Market, the pause of the photographer before the name
Persephone’ (Derrida 2010: 69), the Daughters in Glykeria Basdeki’s play –
permanent residents rather than residing aliens – suffocate under the memo-
ries (and, I’m guessing, the much-lauded  ‘divine play of shadow and light’)
emanating from those same Athenian landmarks, and mourn for the broken
promise of modernity they once carried – for what is Athenian modernity if
not the way we, Athenians, learned to embrace our city’s own antiquity?

An archaeology of the present

What does it mean, then, to undertake an archaeology of the present time?
Especially for someone, like myself, calling himself  ‘an Athenian’? Take this
recent view form Aiolou Street, for example, a chance encounter during one
of my own strolls in downtown Athens (Figure 2): a wrecked shopfront, one

www.intellectbooks.com  117
Dimitris Plantzos

Figure 2:  Deserted shop on Aiolou Street, Athens, March 2019. Photograph:
author.

of the hundreds of postmodern ruins created in post-crisis Athens in the last

decade or so. The shop, one I personally used to frequent, was selling men’s
suit fabrics, mostly imported wool and cashmere (some of the jackets I still
own to this day were tailored with fabrics purchased there). The area (between
Aiolou, Athinas and Ermou Streets, in what we often call the city’s ‘historic /
commercial triangle’) used to house many of those, as well as other types of
small-scale / high-quality retail until the crisis hit: those shop owners who
could retire did exactly that, others faced personal and professional ruin. Those
shops that were not converted into bars, restaurants and fast-food joints
catering for Athens’s ever-expanding hipster-youth culture, and of course its
emerging Airbnb clientele crawling its narrow streets, were left standing in
disrepair, like this one.
In its current state of neglect, the shop allows us to see its nicely crafted,
sophisticated neoclassical façade, with its endearing engaged Ionic pillars
(made of stucco, in true neoclassical fashion) and delicate classicizing surface
ornament shining through a rather depressing, and by now quite rusty, metal
railing unevenly placed over it, and half-hidden behind a second fence, made
of corrugated metal.
Athens is in many ways a neoclassical dream (turned into a nightmare; see
Bastéa 2000; cf. Plantzos 2017b). Though Neoclassicism hit Athens and the
rest of Greece pretty much as an afterthought, and only when it had irrevers-
ibly declined elsewhere, it did become a vital expression for Greek architecture
throughout the nineteenth and until well into the first quarter of the twentieth
century. By the mid- to late twentieth century, when old so-called neoclassical
buildings and façades were being sacrificed to modernization, Greek intellec-
tuals mourned them as the true expressions of Greek authenticity.

118  Journal of Greek Media & Culture

 Athens remains; Still?

A sense of mourning is also discernible in the recently executed mural 2. The two artists are
mostly accessible
adorning the shopfront’s metal fence, signed by well-known Athenian street through Facebook:
artists Achilles and Onebran.2 The mural, a typical  ‘collab’ like those we see https://www.facebook.
in street art worldwide, shows two vaguely familiar, distantly classicizing com/Achilles86/ and
https://www.facebook.
heads, somewhat reminiscent of the Venus de Milo or some other classical com/onebran/,
statuary along those lines, painted by Achilles, projected against a colourful respectively (both
geometrically patterned background signed by Onebran. Achilles is known for accessed 17 June 2019).

his classically themed works, including famous examples like his well-publi-
cized Loser mural in the Kerameikos district (Tulke 2017: 212, Figure 8.4). The
mural’s unauthorized intervention introduces a seemingly non-hegemonic
voice into the Athenian crisis-scape. In the austerity years, Athenian street
art has systematically worked towards the construction of a cultural counter-
discourse, challenging dominant representations of Greece and the Greeks
(Karathanasis 2014). As Henri Lefebvre once observed,  ‘the most effectively
appropriated spaces are those occupied by symbols’ (Lefebvre 1991: 366).
The photograph I publish here as Figure 2, as well as the city-walk that
prompted it, constitute what I would call an ‘archaeology of the present’: an
exploration of the materialities experienced through urban life as a means
of rethinking contemporary society and culture. The collapsing architec-
ture adorning Figure 2 reminds the reader of the defining role assumed by
Neoclassicism in the formation of contemporary Greece – from the façades
of its buildings to the aesthetics of its public life. The overall sense of defeat
emanating from the deserted building reflects the trials and tribulations
of the  ‘Greek crisis’ and the austerity years it introduced (and the personal
attachment – the fact that, I, as an onlooker of the shop’s current derelict
state used to be one of its customers, still using commodities I bought in it –
entrenches me, the author of this piece, into a vivid scenery of urban collapse,
making me part of it). A landscape of abandonment, in short, whose legible
textualities reveal, as Edward W. Soja argued, capital as the  ‘crude and rest-
less auteur’) of our quotidian experience (Soja 1989: 157, original emphasis).
Athens as a crisis-scape, therefore, suggests ‘distinctions and relations’, in the
words of Kevin Lynch, and I, the observer, select, organize and endow with
meaning what I see (Lynch 1960: 6) – while at the same time I become part of
the meaning produced by the city itself.
The classicizing mural, finally, an act of insubordination in itself, under-
lines the deep relationship with classical art Modern Greeks insist on main-
taining – an affinity invented rather than discovered. And all this, firmly seated
in a newly emerging reality of mass-touristification on the one hand and
systemic poverty and homelessness on the other; a city of mythologies mani-
festing themselves through ruins in a permanent state of restauration; a multi-
cultural society in the verge of collapse, imagining itself as the easternmost
bastion of the ‘West’ in its effort not to become the ‘East’.
The articles included in this special issue greatly expand on what
Dimitris Papanikolaou theorized, already in 2011, as  ‘archive trouble’: a sort
of ‘disturbed-archive poetics’, at once undertaking a ‘critique of official archive
logics’, in many ways generated as a result from, as well as in response to
the so-called ‘Greek crisis’ (Papanikolaou 2011). The crisis itself, an excruciat-
ingly violent backlash of austerity politics and neo-liberal social mechanics
afflicting Greece since the late 2000s, was often deployed as an exercise in
archaeopolitics: the implication of classical antiquity as a means to enforce the
logics of austerity and at the same time silence anyone who dares to resist
(Plantzos 2017a, 2019). The result is a city inhabited by a population of bodies

www.intellectbooks.com  119
Dimitris Plantzos

3. Indicatively, party in a permanent state of dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou 2013) – pretty
names in Greece
read like political
much like bijoux de kant’s ‘Daughters’: burdened by a famed genealogy they
slogans in themselves: never chose for themselves, in a city that by now seems to serve as the archive
Nea Dimokratia of its own collapse.
is ‘New Democracy’
– or perhaps ‘New One of our premises in working on Athens and its present cultures by
Republic’ – PA.SO.K. means of an archaeology of the present was that any dealing with the mate-
stands for ‘Panhellenic rialities of urban life, and the way these are organized, is deeply political. This
Socialist Movement’
and KIN.ALL. becomes most evident with the first contribution, Penelope Papailias’s article
for ‘Movement on the atenistas citizens’ group, whose seemingly anti-political stance in fact
for Change’,
retaining the idea
ushers neo-liberal ethics of austerity through a meticulously designed reper-
of ‘movement’ from toire of ephemerality, theatricality, repetitiveness, didacticism and nomadism
its mother-party, while mostly thriving in a new media participatory culture. In their effort to remove
regurgitating Andrea
Papandreou’s ‘change’ politics from life in the polis, the atenistas and similar groupings confirm
– slogan from the 1970s Greek culture’s recent meta-democratic turn, facilitated by the  ‘crisis’ and
and 1980s. SY.RIZ.A., on the mechanics of austerity, and realized mostly through the wide diffusion of
the other hand, stands
for ‘Coalition of the social media in the country.
Radical Left’. Gentrification is one of the commonest methods this new politics of
urban space is enforced in Athens, like in any other contemporary mega-city.
Neighbourhood-cleansing massively affects local populations – often unseen
ones, such as undocumented immigrants or refugees – altering urban-scapes
in drastic, not always centrally designed or well-thought of ways. The article by
Stelios Lekakis in this issue embarks from one such low-key cleansing activity
meant to beautify a certain area in the city in order to make it more accessible
to its own inhabitants, in order to offer a truly archaeological account of that
project’s finds and their interpretation. Stumbling, as it were, on an otherwise
invisible Athenian micro-city, one of many we assume, Lekakis is thus able to
offer us a breath-taking study of Muslim Athens, an in-between place tucked
away from the city itself and its ongoing neo-liberal project effecting its future
shape.
Public art has long now been taken for (public) memory in Athens, and
Greece at large; usually commissioned by state or municipal authorities (less
commonly by private individuals or collectivities), artworks – mostly statu-
ary, mostly classically themed, styled or both – are cavalierly placed here and
there across the city, ostensibly in memory of its history though in fact as a
crude way of furthering their patron’s own political agenda. A case in point
is the bronze statue of Alexander the Great recently unveiled in Athens, just
a few weeks prior to this year’s municipal elections and the end of Giorgos
Kaminis’s term as mayor (Kampouris 2019). Erected at a time when the
central government was under strong criticism by Right- and Centre-Right
parties such as Nea Dimokratia and KIN.ALL. (a recent mutation of Andreas
Papanderou’s PA.SO.K.).3 for a long-awaited treaty with Greece’s northern
neighbouring country up to then identified as the ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia’ (see, e.g. Smith 2018), the statue was seen as a political gesture on
behalf of Kaminis, already a MEP candidate with KIN.ALL. for the European
Parliament Elections of 26 May (where he failed to get elected) and a State
Deputy appointed by his party for the national elections that were to follow
on 7 July. Much of the political and diplomatic bras de fer between Greece and
what now is bilaterally recognized as the ‘Republic of North Macedonia’ was
centred on classical antiquity, and the ethnic and cultural origins of Alexander
of Macedon (‘the Great’) in particular. When Kaminis, as mayor of Athens,
played his hand of archaeopolitics through the dedication of a statue of the
long-gone king (who was actually loathed by the Athenians of his time, if

120  Journal of Greek Media & Culture

 Athens remains; Still?

4. Pappas, known for

his recognizably
conservative,
representational
modernist style, is
Greece’s state sculptor
par excellence, having
signed, besides this
Alexander, no less than
five centrally located,
over-lifesize statues
of Greek political and
literary figures (two
of Venizelos, and one
each of Trikoupis,
Makrygiannis and
Elytis).

Figure 3:  Yannis Pappas, Alexander the Great, Athens, May 2019. Photograph:
author.

celebrations greeting his death is anything to go by), he interfered with his

city’s urban space (see Figure 3) while at the same time used classical antiq-
uity, and its modernist reflections, as political argumentation. The statue itself,
a mediocre rendering of a classical sculptural type by a modernist sculptor
(Yannis Pappas, 1913–2005),4 penetrates the city’s horizon – and its citizens’
everyday experience – as a stern reminder of who (and whose ideas) are actu-
ally in charge of the nation’s politics.
The article by Faidon Moudopoulos Athanasiou and Dimitris Giannakis
published in this issue, addresses the problem of public art through the
dynamic relationship between art narratives and attitudes towards monu-
ments in post-crisis Athens, using as its case-studies two emblematic sites of
contemporary political life: the Polytechneio (the city’s Technical University)
and the Parko Eleftherias (the site of the former Military Police barracks).
Through their discussion of value (political or other) attached to specific monu-
ments or sites, the two authors tackle the problems of history versus memory,
monumentality in conjunction with monumentalization and the ways artistic
expression can or cannot cope with the challenges they pose. In choosing to
shift their focus from antiquity-related monuments to recent-history ones, the
two authors also explore the tensions between the city’s famed past and its
less glamorous present, as well as the ways one is entangled with the other.
In her own article, Charis Kanellopoulou discusses a different breed of
artistic interventions in the city’s public space, not orchestrated top-down,
as in the case of the Alexander statue discussed above, but designed and
executed by less established artists and collectivities. Rather than welcoming
recession as a ‘challenge’ or an ‘opportunity’, as the well-known cliché would
have it, the projects studied by this author may be seen as an attempt to mobi-
lize the Athenian population at large in a re-evaluation of public space and
our activities in it. In that, this article seems to be in dialogue both with the

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Dimitris Plantzos

opening paper (in an attempt to re-frame public participation as a political

gesture rather than an apolitical one) and the one on the Ilissos River and its
unwanted inhabitants (in that we are encouraged to view in-between, void
spaces, under a markedly different light).
Last in the sequence of articles for this issue, and culminating as it were
the pursuit they instigate, comes an article by Neni Panourgiá, returning to
the dynamic dialectics of recognition. Deploying the concept of recognition
towards her city’s most familiar neighbourhoods, the author rereads Athens as
a site of social and political resistance. As her city is being turned into a gentri-
fied dystopia by the previous (and one assumes the newly elected) municipal
authorities, the author takes the opportunity to reflect on memory as resist-
ance – collective, as well as (crucially) personal. And, as if to prove the arti-
cle’s point, on 26 August 2019, and while this issue was already in the process
of publication, Greek police raided a number of squats in the Exarcheia area
in central Athens (King and Manoussaki-Adamopoulou 2019). This was just
one day after the city’s new mayor, Kostas Bakoyannis, was sworn in, having
run a campaign on the promise of ‘establishing order’ and ‘cleaning’ the area,
habitually known to have been frequented by anarchist groups. Greece’s new
prime-minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis (incidentally, though perhaps not acci-
dentally, the mayor’s uncle) had also vowed to  ‘bring order’ to the neigh-
bourhood, alluding to the area’s heavy drug-use and trade problems. Still,
the particular raid did not seem to target Exarcheia’s drug culture as such;
instead, the police arrested a number of refugees from Syria and other near-
eastern and African countries, with many women and children among them,
in an obvious effort to ‘clean’ Athens from its undocumented – and apparently
unwanted – inhabitants, making way for the area’s gentrification. As the raids
continued through September, the fight for Athens seemed to be entering a
new, quite harsher phase.
In their two specially committed contributions, finally, Christos Chrisso­
poulos and Penelope Petsini, in their capacity as practitioners of their craft,
sidestep academic poise in order to substantiate what this issue attempts to
achieve: a theoretically sound exploration of Athens as an urban community –
a site of memories and traumas in the process of being turned into a neo-
liberal dystopia. Chrissopoulos, first, also evoking somewhat the concept of
recognition already utilized by Panourgiá, retraces his steps through a number
of Athenian neighbourhoods where he once lived as a way of coming to terms
with change. Petsini, finally, offers a visual essay discussing how Greece’s ‘ever-
lasting crisis’ has affected its major city, and how this has been explored by
recent photographic output, and especially the stunning work of Nikos
Panayotopoulos.
In sum, this is not a collection of articles put together merely as a response
to the  ‘Greek crisis’ and the recession it generated. The articles published
here attempt a re-charting of Athens as a city in the process of spatial and
social restructuring (cf. Soja 1989: 183–89); as a field of cultural expression,
a deeply traumatized, multi-cultural community in awe of its own urbaniza-
tion. To this end, we explore the biopolitics of the ‘Greek crisis’ as well as the
centrally deployed cultural gestures that made austerity seem more palata-
ble, alongside similar gestures devised and enacted against it. The articles and
essays published in this special issue draw attention to the gentrification of
urban space, the commodification of cultural life, the restructuring of public
memory, the renegotiation of collective histories. Although here our focus is
Athens – a city of considerable symbolic capital now undergoing a deeply felt

122  Journal of Greek Media & Culture

 Athens remains; Still?

metamorphosis – what we discuss in this issue could be applied to other such

metropoleis worldwide, from Lisbon and Dublin to Mexico City, Vienna and
Bangkok. We are, in fact, talking about the ‘right to the city’; even though, as
David Harvey warned us a few years ago, ‘to claim the right to the city is, in
effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists (if it ever truly did)’
(Harvey 2013: xv). An archaeology of the present, after all, remains an archae-
ology like any other: it best describes things that are present no more.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Giannis Skourletis for allowing me to consult the unpub-
lished script of bijoux de kant’s The Daughters and also for providing the image
for Figure 1. I would also like to extend my profound thanks to this issue’s
authors, anonymous reviewers and the Journal’s editors for their support
throughout the completion of this project.

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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Dimitris Plantzos is a classical archaeologist, educated at Athens and Oxford.
He is the author of various articles and books on Greek art and archaeol-
ogy, archaeological theory and classical reception. His Greek-language text-
book on Greek Art and Archaeology, first published in 2011 by Kapon Editions,
was published in 2016 in English and is now available by American publish-
ers Lockwood Press in Atlanta, GA. He was co-editor of the volume A
Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth Century Greece
(published in Athens in 2008) and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Greek
Art (2012; paperback ed. 2018). His more recent books are Archaeologies of
the Classical, an overview of archaeological method in the post-positivist era
(Eikostos Protos, 2014); The Recent Future, a study of archaeological biopolitics
in contemporary Greece (Nefeli, 2016); and his study The Art of Painting in
Ancient Greece (Kapon Editions and Lockwood Press, 2018). He is co-direc-
tor of the Argos Orestikon Excavation Project and an associate editor for the
Journal of Greek Media and Culture; he teaches classical archaeology and recep-
tion at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7674-1062

Dimitris Plantzos has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

124  Journal of Greek Media & Culture