Text by Theophilos Tramboulis
For the last fifteen or so years, the centre of Athens has been changing; public space has been besieged with functions that are related, almost in their entirety, with diversion. The old uses give way to new ones: empty warehouses, bankrupt manufacturing businesses, deserted houses, but also brand new pedestrian precincts, pavements, small market squares are all converted into bars, restaurants and open air cafés, that is, into reception spaces for the crowd that swarms round these streets after 10 every night. The itineraries in the city are, by and large, suspended, unless they lead to one of the hastily put together backdrops of this expanded fun park. None of the areas that are situated on the concentric circles around the Syntagma square and the Omonoia square, which, historically have constituted the two main poles at the heart of the city, have been excluded from this transformation: neither the old bourgeois, residential quarter of Kolonaki, nor the traditionally industrial area of Psyrri, the grass roots neighborhoods of Kerameikos, or the industrial warehouses on Piraios Street.
There is definitely some ideological dynamic that contributes to this acted out diversion, to this substitute for pleasure. It may be the dutiful submissiveness to the stereotypes of the Mediterranean mentality, the quest for the purposeless as a characteristic of identity. It may also be a general, and somewhat badly staged, rehearsal for the absolute, in due time, dominance of the service economy; a tourist Stanislavski method according to which the staff-to-be pretend to be customers so that they can best meet their clientele’s needs in the future. What is certain, though, is that along with the concept of the centre of the city, which, after the 1980s, replaced the vision of moving to the suburbs, the vision of entertainment -that is, in actual fact, the compulsive management of leisure- defines an imaginary structure that unifies the centre of the city into a relatively boring and desiccated utopia.
We could possibly contrast this public space for leisure with that of the large-scale construction projects, particularly those of Attiki highway and the new airport, which, have been considered prime determinants in the city’s transmutation. We may argue, for instance, that the latter took place in the periphery, whereas, as far as the former is concerned, the emphasis lays on the heart of the urban nexus. We may even claim that the latter are places devoid of meaning, transporting melting-pots in which travelers temporarily lose their identity and relation to the community, only to retrieve them both when they reach their destination, whereas the former are enclosed spaces that organise temporary groups and allocate shifting identities, impulsive communities that are united by deictic, in the here and now sense, entertainment. Still, these differences are only superficial. For, both the grand infrastructure developments in Athens and the dominance of leisure share the same primary characteristics: they constitute “spaces of anonymity that accommodate more and more people every day…they stand as the opposite of residence…they are places that can be defined neither in terms of their identity, nor in terms of the relationships they form, or their history”. They are the archetypes of this new supracultural condition that Marc Auge calls non place. This is precisely what can describe Athens after the Olympic Games: it is a city that absorbs tensions behind the façade of entertainment, a city that represses politics, for it submits public space to lightweight discourse, a city that exists in the in-between. The new utopia of Athens is the non topia.
Nonetheless, in the course of this fifteen-year period, Athens has accommodated a new populace of immigrants that was to be added to its traditionally marginalised inhabitants, the roma and all sorts of pariahs. The conditions under which such stratifications and exclusions are formed and interpreted can be examined in different fields. The field of leisure is probably the least predictable, but, still, the most characteristic of all. For, there is no institutional, or legal for that matter, mechanism that prohibits the access of the outcast to the invain, standardised nocturnal feast that takes place in central Athens night after night. On the contrary, this mechanism is imaginary, and thus, all the more effective. What is more, both outcasts and citizens that have the right to access the public space of leisure physically coexist. The crucial point that makes all the difference, though, is that the immigrants, the roma, or the deprived can only enter the space that the privileged entertain themselves only if they sell tissues or flowers, that is, only if they confirm their very exclusion. Augé believes that in order to enter the non place one needs to hold a piece of identity, say a passport or a credit card. Here the terms are different. In order to verify that one has no right of access to the non place, one needs to display a certificate that would verify that one belongs nowhere, that one is an immigrant, an alien to the urban nexus, a nomad. For the claimants, leisure in Athens functions as a utopia of the non place; for the outcasts, it is the very abolition of space as atopia.
Since 1988, and within the context of the work in progress Τ.Α.Μ.Α. (Temporary Autonomous Museum for All), Maria Papadimitriou has been occupied with a community of Vallach-Romanian origin that lives in Avliza in the outskirts of Athens. To a great extent this artistic act is a secondary result and aesthetic complement to her political action. She does not merely record the living conditions of the community, but intervenes in it, and it is this intervention that she proposes as her work.
“Trans-Bonanza Platform (Luv Car)” is a truck, whose open wagon has been converted into a platform that can be used as a stage for live concerts or as a DJ’s set. The truck roams the neighbourhoods of Athens, stopping here and there and inviting passers-by to participate in an impromptu celebration.
Roma’s life, and especially the features that are related to their festive rituals, are more often than not regarded as nearby sources of exoticism. The truck is an identifiable stereotype in the mythology that has largely been built around them and has often been used as an empty of significance index of precisely this exoticism. However, Papadimitriou charges it with new meaning, reintroducing and domesticating it in social space. Thus, it transcends the limits prescribed by the various leisure zones, transgressing not only urban, but also ideologically set boundaries. It calls to a celebration, a kind of carnival, in which roles are inversed, defining, at the same time, a field of revolt. In his essay entitled “Program of a Proletarian’s Children Theater”, Walter Benjamin describes the great importance that revolutionary theater plays in the inversion of the roles between the educator and the children. Assuming the role of the artist as an educator, Papadimitriou operates a parallel function. Diversion is no longer a mechanism of discrimination against the socially excluded. The locality regains its ideological characteristics, and the public space, instead of being in command of leisure, defines a space of freedom.
