Capitalist Realism

Συντελεσμένο Μέλλον | Παρελθόν Διαρκείας

Future Perfect | Past Continuous
CAPITALIST REALISM
Συντελεσμένο Μέλλον | Παρελθόν Διαρκείας
Future Perfect | Past Continuous
2018

© Εκδόσεις Πανεπιστημίου Μακεδονίας, © University of Macedonia Press,

Μουσείο Φωτογραφίας θεσσαλονίκης, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography,
Πηνελόπη Πετσίνη Penelope Petsini
© για τα κείμενα: οι συγγραφείς © texts: the authors
© για τα έργα: οι καλλιτέχνες © works: the artists

Σχεδιασμός εξωφύλλου|Cover design:

Θωμάς Γκινούδης, Μαρία Κεφαλά | Thomas Ginoudis, Maria Kefala
Φωτογραφία εξωφύλλου|Cover photo: © Paolo Woods, Gabriele Galimberti

ISBN: 978-618-5196-35-6

Εκδόσεις Πανεπιστημίου Μακεδονίας University of Macedonia Press

Εγνατία 156 Egnatia 156,
546 36 Θεσσαλονίκη 546 36 Thessaloniki,
Greece
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Διεύθυνση εκδόσεων: Ιωάννα Δανδέλια Director: Ioanna Dandelia

Μουσείο Φωτογραφίας Θεσσαλονίκης Thessaloniki Museum of Photography

Ιδιαίτερο τμήμα του Κρατικού Μουσείου Independent Department of the State
Σύγχρονης Τέχνης Museum of Contemporary Art
Αποθήκη Α’, Λιμάνι Θεσσαλονίκης Warehouse A’, Port of Thessaloniki
546 25 Θεσσαλονίκη 546 25 Thessaloniki, Greece
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info.thmp@culture.gr info.thmp@culture.gr
www.thmphoto.gr www.thmphoto.gr
www.photobiennale-greece.gr www.photobiennale-greece.gr
Μανώλης Μαραγκούλης Πρόεδρος Manolis Maragoulis President
Χρήστος Αλεξάκης Αντιπρόεδρος Christos Alexakis Vice President
Μάριος Ελευθεριάδης Μέλος Marios Eleftheriadis Member
Γιάννης Επαμεινώνδας Μέλος Giannis Epaminondas Member
Μανώλης Σκούφιας Μέλος Manolis Skoufias Member
Ηρακλής Παπαϊωάννου Διευθυντής Hercules Papaioannou Director
 Περιεχόμενα|Contents

Eισαγωγή | Introduction
Πηνελόπη Πετσίνη | Penelope Petsini:
«Καπιταλιστικός Ρεαλισμός: η απώλεια του μέλλοντος
και το επίμονο παρελθόν» |
"Capitalist Realism: The loss of the future and the persistent past" .................. 6

Capitalist Realism I
Συντελεσμένο Μέλλον | Future Perfect
Κείμενα | Essays
Φώτης Μηλιώνης | Fotis Milionis:
«Γενεαλογία της δυστοπίας: από το φαντασιακό στο πραγματικό» |
"Genealogy of dystopia: From the imaginary onto the real" ...................... 20
Mike Davies:
«Η Νεκρή Δύση: οικοκτονία στη χώρα του Marlboro» |
"The Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro country".......................................... 32
Αλεξάνδρα Μόσχοβη | Alexandra Moschovi:
«Τυπολογίες της Εργασίας: μια αρχαιολογία» |
"Typologies of labour: An archaeology" ...................................................... 42
Κώστας Χριστόπουλος | Kostas Christopoulos:
«Για την "παρακμή" της πρωτοποριακής ιδεολογίας:
"αριστερές" και "δεξιές" πρωτοπορίες» |
"On the ‘decline’ of avant-garde ideology:
‘Left’ and ‘Right’-wing avant-gardes" .......................................................... 56
Julian Stallabrass:
«Είσαι φωτογράφος;» | "Are you a photographer?" .................................. 66
2ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊCapitalist Realism

Έργα | Works
Johny Miller ................................................................................................. 76
Mishka Henner ............................................................................................ 82
Richard Misrach........................................................................................... 86
Πάρις Πετρίδης | Paris Petridis ................................................................... 92
Paolo Woods & Gabriele Gallimberti .......................................................... 96
Jacqueline Hassink .................................................................................... 100
Μανώλης Μπαμπούσης | Manolis Baboussis ......................................... 104
Nick Hannes .............................................................................................. 108
Julian Stallabrass ....................................................................................... 112
Carlos Spottorno ....................................................................................... 114
Stefan Chow & Lin Huiyi ............................................................................ 118
Freya Najade ............................................................................................. 120
Carlos Ayesta & Guillaume Bression.......................................................... 124
Greg Girard ................................................................................................ 128
Rufina Wu & Stefan Canham ..................................................................... 134
Stefan Canham .......................................................................................... 137
Anna Skladmann ....................................................................................... 140
Mark Peterson ........................................................................................... 144
Χρήστος Καπάτος | Christos Kapatos ........................................................ 147
Κώστας Χριστόπουλος | Kostas Christopoulos ......................................... 150
Sejin Moon ................................................................................................ 152
Πάνος Κοκκινιάς | Panos Kokkinias ........................................................... 154
Πέτρος Ευσταθιάδης | Petros Efstathiadis ................................................ 156
Trevor Paglen ............................................................................................. 158

Capitalist Realism II
Παρελθόν Διαρκείας | Past Continuous
Κείμενα | Essays
Δημήτρης Παπανικολάου | Dimitris Papanikolaou:
«Αναταραχή Αρχείου»|"Archive Trouble" ................................................ 162
Soraya Lunardi - Δημήτρης Δημούλης | Dimitris Dimoulis:
«Desarquivando – Desarchivando. Αρχεία, μνήμη και τέχνη» |
"Desarquivando – Desarchivando. Archives, memory, and art"................ 174
 Περιεχόμενα | Contents 3Ê

Paula Luttringer:
«Μαρτυρία» | "Testimony"....................................................................... 184
Susan Meiselas:
«Σώμα σε λοφοπλαγιά» | "Body on a hillside" ......................................... 188
Γιάννης Ψυχοπαίδης | Jannis Psychopedis
«Μάθημα Ιστορίας: τα κάτω άκρα» |
"History Lesson: The lower extremities" ................................................... 192
Andrea Stultiens:
«Η πολιτική της παρουσίασης: μερικές σκέψεις σχετικά με την έκθεση
φωτογραφιών Ebifananyi στην και από την Όυγκάντα» |
"The Politics of presentation, some thoughts on exhibiting photographs
Ebifananyi in and from Uganda" ............................................................... 194
Alex Supartono:
«Από τη Σιγκαπούρη με φύση» | "From Singapore with nature" ............. 200

Έργα | Works
Susan Meiselas .......................................................................................... 212
Rosângela Rennó ....................................................................................... 214
Paula Luttringer ......................................................................................... 220
Γιάννης Ψυχοπαίδης | Jannis Psychopedis ............................................... 228
Νικόλας Βεντουράκης | Nikolas Ventourakis ............................................ 234
Andrea Stultiens ........................................................................................ 238
Robert Zhao Renhui................................................................................... 244
Ang Song Nian ........................................................................................... 246
Woong Soak Teng ...................................................................................... 248
Marvin Tang............................................................................................... 250

Επίμετρο | Coda
Ηρακλής Παπαϊωάννου | Hercules Papaioannou: «Crisis? What crisis?»
"Crisis? What crisis?" ...................................................................................... 252
Eυχαριστίες .................................................................................................... 258
Στοιχεία εκθέσεων ......................................................................................... 260

Archive Trouble
ŝŵŝƚƌŝƐWĂƉĂŶŝŬŽůĂŽƵ
[…]
For some time now, I have been having
this peculiar dream: that I could take
both Lauren Berlant and Hal Foster for a
walk around contemporary, ‘crisis strick-
en’ and ‘alternative-art-creating’ Ath-
ens. The reason is simple. Hal Foster is
one of the most influential art critics to
have chronicled the postmodern turn
to archive in modern art1 - a trend that
has been strategically, urgently and ex-
cessively employed in Greece in recent
years. And Lauren Berlant is the theorist
of affect and emotions who published,
in 2011, ƌƵĞůKƉƟŵŝƐŵ – a mesmerizing
reflection on the structure of feeling that
I would recognize as the prevailing one
in the country today.
Foster describes the ‘archival im-
pulse’ as the ‘desire to turn belatedness
into becomingness, to recoup failed vi-
sions in art, literature, philosophy and
everyday life into possible scenarios of
alternative kinds of social relations, to
transform the no-place of the archive
into the no-place of a utopia’. It is, he
1 See Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’,
KĐƚŽďĞƌ, n. 110, 2004, p.p. 3-22, and ĂĚ
EĞǁ ĂLJƐ͗ ƌƚ͕ ƌŝƟĐŝƐŵ͕ ŵĞƌŐĞŶĐLJ,
Verso, London, 2015, p.p. 31-60.
163
says, a will to connect what cannot be
connected, a wish to relate, ‘a partial
[and unexpected] recovery of the utopi-
an demand [… a] move to turn “excava-
tion sites” into “construction sites” […]
a shift away from a melancholic culture
that views the historical as little more
than the traumatic’.2 This type of effort
to develop connections and create at-
tachments within and through trauma
is what Berlant calls Cruel Optimism:
the persistent yet critical attachment to
fantasies of good life, at the very mo-
ment when those fantasies start to fray.
A mood characterized by ‘depression,
dissociation, pragmatism, cynicism, opti-
mism, activism, or an incoherent mash.’3
Take a walk around Athens today, vis-
it an exhibition, read the work of new
Greek writers, follow the most inventive
performance artists and theatre practi-
tioners: in one way or another, most of
them keep returning to the notion (and
material existence) of the archive. They
talk about the past and its remnants
not in order to find a solution, but as a
2 Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, p. 22.
3 Lauren Berlant, ƌƵĞů KƉƟŵŝƐŵ, Duke
University Press, Durham, NC, p. 2.

practice of reinvention; and they do so
against all odds: in the most persistent,
absurdly creative and even more absurd-
ly optimistic ways; what we see at work,
at least in the arts, today in Greece, is a
ĐƌƵĞůůLJŽƉƟŵŝƐƟĐĂƌĐŚŝǀĂůŝŵƉƵůƐĞ.
Six years ago, asked to contribute a
piece about culture during the ‘Greek
Crisis’, I sat and made a list of the trends
that I noticed around me.4 The ‘return to
history’ was one such major trend: the
recent history of the Greek nation was
being debated again on the theatrical
stage as it was debated in newspaper
columns (and in the books newspapers
gave as gifts with their Sunday editions);
the success of history programmes on
the radio and television went in paral-
lel with the proliferation of historical
novels on the recent past; the historian
and the political scientist were becom-
ing central figures in public debates,
while the researcher, the historian, the
photographer, the chronicler and the ar-
chivist, were becoming the protagonists
in many a new Greek novel; and sites of
importance for Greek history, lieux de
mémoire, were becoming, once again,
sites of contestation, as they were also
becoming sites of progressive art instal-
4 Dimitris Papanikolaou, “Archive Trouble.”
Hot Spots, ƵůƚƵƌĂůŶƚŚƌŽƉŽůŽŐLJ website,
October 26, 2011. https://culanth.org/
fieldsights/247-archive-trouble
Αναταραχή Αρχείου | Archive Trouble 165Ê
lations. Yet this was not the only trend I
noticed. Alongside a ‘return to history’,
one could also see an insistence on the
body politic and its presence, on kin-
ship and tradition as it left its mark on
people’s bodily predispositions; a focus
on identity and on moments of extreme
pain and excessive bodily reaction; an ef-
fort to confront new policies of life and
death; to ruminate on which lives matter,
and which lives become marginalized: an
everyday-life-thinking on biopolitics.
If these were two distinct trends, a
return to history and an embodied gene-
alogical critique, they most certainly, in
their most significant examples, also be-
came intertwined. And it was exactly in
order to underline that link that I coined
the term Archive Trouble, an obvious
wordplay bringing together Derrida’s
notion of Archive Fever, Judith Butler’s
Gender Trouble, and the rich analytical
frameworks they both represent.
Six years on, we are still, or rather, I
would argue, we are even more fully, in
the domain of Archive Trouble. The best
of Greek art articulates an intense bio-
political critique that often starts from
thinking about (an image of and the de-
ployment of) the body in crisis, as well as
exploring (a mourning for and a messing
with) archives of culture, of belonging,
and of social life.
[…]
Of course, I could go on here detail-

ing the projects we have seen in recent
years in Greece in art, theatre, art instal-
lation, film, music, performance lecture,
architectural debate, academic activism,
and those in between. Projects following
recognizable international trends, com-
ing out of groups or individuals, housed
in abandoned and derelict buildings, in
empty spaces, in historically significant
sites, in once thriving areas of a former-
ly booming Athens; projects with huge
funding from national and internation-
al institutions or with no funding at all;
projects that call themselves expansive,
open-ended processes, and turn un-
used areas of the city into novel spaces
of public art, debate and performance.
Compiling such a list, though, would be
beside the point. Because what I want to
show is neither the influence of archive
art in Greece today, nor how crisis-strick-
en Greeks return to (their) history for
answers, and how this turn to history
affects both the country’s public sphere
and its cultural milieu. I don’t want to
detail ǁŚĂƚ is happening. What I would
like to do instead is to think about ŚŽǁ
something is happening, even when we
do not know exactly what it is. I want,
therefore, to talk about Archive Trouble
as a modality that we witness, available
and expanding, in Greece today. The ex-
amples I could go on detailing, and so
many others, are disparate and diverse;
yet what they have in common is a per-
Αναταραχή Αρχείου | Archive Trouble 167Ê
vasive feeling of urgency; an iconoclastic
return to the past; a dense and embod-
ied biopolitical thinking and analysis; an
attempt to create, out of all this, a new
political and widely participatory art in
the present.
What I am suggesting, therefore, is
that Archive Trouble is a more general,
much more diffuse, and for this reason,
much more potent and fluid cultural mo-
dality, the mode in which many Greeks,
at the moment, find themselves, and in
which they opt to respond to the situa-
tion of socio-political upheaval, econom-
ic instability and social precarity that has
become proverbially the Crisis – with a
capital c. This modality is developing in
the present: it can be mapped and re-
mapped; but, perhaps more effective-
ly, it manifests itself in small gestures
which, viewed as a sequence, seem like
the unfolding of a continuous manifesto.
If I were to start charting this unfolding,
this is how it would look:
Archive Trouble is precisely this moment
when the aesthetic reframes historical
and political understanding and alerts us
to the modalities of a history in the pres-
ent. Aesthetics plays a role in that ŚŝƐƚŽƌLJ
ŝŶ ƚŚĞ ƉƌĞƐĞŶƚ, when you understand it
as ‘not only the place where we reha-
bituate our sensorium by taking in new
material and becoming more refined in
relation to it. But also the domain that
provides metrics for understanding how

we pace and space our encounters with
things, how we manage the too close-
ness of the world and also the desire to
have an impact on it that has some rela-
tion to its impact on us’.5
Archive Trouble returns to the past in
both its materiality and its standing in
the official historical narrative. It pairs
this with a constant reference to the
current socio-political state of affairs,
and a running repetition of images (and
texts) from Crisis-related events, includ-
ing demonstrations, events that have
already acquired a symbolic dimension.
The archive of the past and the archive
of the present are thus worked togeth-
er in quick succession, and at the same
time, the bodily experience of an in-
tensely precarious present is also either
represented, referred to, or simulated/
shared through audience participation.
Archive Trouble recontextualizes – uses
cultural texts from the past in new mo-
dalities –while also accepting that its
own context, that of the Crisis, is ines-
capable.
Archive Trouble takes into account and
interacts with the surge in information
flow. Its archival poetics presuppose a
public interacting with this flow of im-
ages and data, questioning information
from the past and creating personal,
5 Berlant, ƌƵĞůKƉƟŵŝƐŵ, p. 12.
Αναταραχή Αρχείου | Archive Trouble 169Ê
novel and agonistic archives.
Archive Trouble aims to ‘unearth’ hid-
den voices or lost patterns. But at the
same time it aims to problematize the
process of unearthing and digging, to be
ĂďŽƵƚ cultures of digging and unearth-
ing, as well as to show that giving voice
to the erased or forgotten images of the
past does not end up creating a fuller (or
more plural) archive, but rather results
in laying bare the constitutive incom-
pleteness of the historical archive itself.
It, therefore, also attacks the inconsis-
tency of ideologies anchoring their legit-
imacies to grand narratives and ‘settled’
archival records. It is, obviously, sensitive
to the political effect this process can
have, especially in a country like Greece.
Archive Trouble involves gestures whose
surface narrative could be seen as sim-
ple and transparent: you could read
them as talking about history, democ-
racy, the crisis of capitalism, the crisis of
representation or the current deplorable
state of political affairs. Yet, they also
say something more – and in a form that
constantly pushes you to question some-
what more.
Archive Trouble offers a critique of in-
stitutional archives, of institutional sym-
bols and of institutional time.
Archive Trouble thus tries to concoct
other temporal and textual dimensions,
often in subtle, surreptitious ways.
Archive Trouble works with a very com-
 Αναταραχή Αρχείου | Archive Trouble 171Ê

Κώστας Χριστόπουλος Χωρίς τίτλο, 2013, χαρτί εφημερίδας, collage και de-collage, 25 x 32 εκ.
Kostas Christopoulos Untitled, 2013, newspaper, collage and de-collage, 25 x 32 cm

plex structure of metaphor/metonymy/
allegory that invites the audience to de-
cide their position towards these modes,
and their implication in public rhetoric,
national pedagogy and political action.
Archive Trouble creates a dialogue with
the intimate archives of belonging, of
kinship, and of emotions. It mounts a
biopolitical critique and issues biopolit-
ical noise. It foregrounds the presence
and affective intensity of the body. While
doing so, it also draws attention to both
the body’s foundational precarity (and
its heightened precarity in the current
situation), as well as the body’s consti-
tution within the Greek public sphere (as
gendered, emotional, desiring, circum-
spect). The body in trouble brings togeth-
er a critique that combines the body’s
foundational troubles with a troubling
of the current neoliberal proclamations
about ‘reform’, ‘austerity measures’ and
the promise of a future ‘good life’.
As it talks about the past, Archive
Trouble also uses the scripting of the
present of the crisis in order to suggest
‘archives of the precarious now’.
It adopts, decisively, an intense ƉƌĞƐ-
ĞŶƚ ĐŽŶƟŶƵŽƵƐ mode of speaking. Or
rather, what we could call an ĂƌĐŚŝǀĂů
ƉƌĞƐĞŶƚ becomes its favourite tense.
By being iconoclastic, playful and of-
ten shying away from providing a clear
historical/ analytical reading of sources,
Archive Trouble does not avoid the pass-
Αναταραχή Αρχείου | Archive Trouble 173Ê
ing of judgment, or the confrontation
with retrograde, nationalist or intolerant
readings of history.
Archive Trouble is based on irony, pas-
tiche, genre playfulness, undermining of
generic expectations, mixing of forms;
but it also centres on violence, expres-
sionism, the uncanny and the grotesque.
It is loud, overflowing, fast, idiosyncratic,
unsettled.
Archive Trouble is based on audience
participation and is committed to the
creation of open texts. It does not offer
solutions. But its (political) critique, ar-
ticulated in a radicalized archival pres-
ent, can be extremely powerful.
The cruellest thing is that, with the
Crisis almost a decade on, a sense of fu-
tility is now a central part of this Archive.
Yet the most optimistic element that,
almost a decade on, can still generate
energy, belonging, pacing, spacing, and
all the surreptitiously unsettling powers
of insistence, is, still, this never-ending
Trouble.
(excerpt, first published in K.Botano-
va, Ch.Chryssopoulos and J.Cooiman
(eds) ƵůƚƵƌĞƐĐĂƉĞƐ͗ ƌĐŚĂĞŽůŽŐLJ ŽĨ ƚŚĞ
&ƵƚƵƌĞ (Basel: Cristoph Merian Verlag,
2017), pp.38-52)