Our last day had an inspiring kick-off when we met Maria Lalou, a Greek artist/ researcher and Skafte Aymo-Boot, a Danish architect on the rooftop overlooking Athens; looking from above, observing urban landscape. The sky was grey and slowing dropping tears. Horizon revels layered clash of different architectural elements.
Together the Amsterdam based lovely duo run a transdisciplinary project called Un-finished(http://un-finished.org/[UN]_introduction.htm). It is a study on the architectural archetype of the unfinished concrete building found everywhere in the Athens cityscape, turned to a performed archive. In other words, the project aims at mapping and registering the unfinished buildings in Athens. At the moment there are approximately 200 objects as they call the buildings in the archive. The words they use when speaking about the project were very poetic and romantic: to collect buildings, concrete skeleton, anti monument, contemporary ruin parallel to ancient ruin, contemporary archeology, owner holding a dream and void of the city. Object of interest revolts only around concrete buildings. It’s its liquidity that becomes solid and timeless strength.
From the rooftop the fact that there is no architectural
planning in Athens can be easily observed. Each building is by one person. This
serves the project very well. Maria and Safte are interested in personal
stories: emotional, comic, tragic behind the image of the building, trying to
get behind the history of the city. Private and public are closely intertwined.
Rough constructions with
emotional baggage.
The unfinished buildings describe the city socially and politically. Stories of the past and the
future. Investigating history of
unfinished ones it´s not an easy task.
It´s a challenge that requires good people-relation skills, to get to the core
of the building.
Concrete skeleton gets an organic quality. Ruinporn
dystopia charm.
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Our second meeting of the day was a
walk-and-talk style discussion with Orestis Doulos. He is a member of the Greek
section of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), also known as the
Communist Tendency. It started to rain when we were standing on the hill and
having a look over Athens. A political
stroll.
We talked about Athens as a city, politicization of universities, the crisis and its cause and consequences, its positive and negative sides, future visions and alternative scenarios. According to Orestis there is no solution under capitalism. It’s a matter of the deep crisis of capitalism itself. The crisis is destroying the petit bourgeois making them feel closer to working class. Social activities are getting more and more common when people are trying to fill the gap caused by government instead of putting pressure on the government. Things are getting worse day by day.
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In the end of the day we had a cup of
coffee with Christos Chryssopoulos www.chrissopoulosvivlia.blogspot.com), writer and Anastasia Douka (https://anastasiadouka.wordpress.com/), visual artist. Raindrops kept on dancing. As Christos is devoted to
writing and literature theory the topics were alike: the explorative nature of
a writing process and its aims, the idea of intersubjectivity and literature as
a medium to open up a space for discourse.
Christos underlined the act of
misreading: texts can be appropriated politically by extreme right or extreme left.
It is about allowing different use. This all leads to a question if literature
can be dangerous. The writing does not have to be political or economic to open
up a space for discourse. It can be poetic or aesthetic as well. Another interesting
thing raised up was the strategy of unfamiliarization: what is unfamiliar in
familiar?
