Route: Plakes Vlychou- path-Ag. Mamas to Hydra with the sunrise.
We set off at 6 am, Eleni, Stephanos, Thalia, Evemar, from the house in Ano Hydra. We got cheese pies from the bakery, next to the Pirate, which was just closing and we got coffee from another cafe on the beach that had just opened. Stavros was waiting for us with the water taxi. By dawn we could see the sunrise over the sea.
Location: Koumoundourou Square.
The issues that interested us during the workshop that preceded the action concerned the public sphere with emphasis on immigration, borders, displacement, common resources, and social ecology. The workshop focused on human condition. The ways of interaction, and the exchange of cultures and ideas, are the ones that need to be studied on the opposite side of spatial segregation and xenophobia.
Location: Ark in the patio at Benaki Museum.
A gesture against the climate of violence and the sweep operations in the center of Athens. The action is about the displaced urban nomads who live in the inhospitable city center. As a crowd which consists of subjectivities, entering the ark with their habits and their foods. They show us their faces, they tell their story, they talk about the primary foods they love and save inside the ark, which becomes a place of hospitality. The ark becomes their shelter.
Αs we discover and experience the conditions that have prevailed in the centre of Athens we are lead to look further into the specificities and oppositions that have marked the evolution of the city in recent years. We also realize that we need to act here and now.
After the Olympic games and given the absence of a program or plan to answer the pressing issues of a Mediterranean metropolis in transformation, the centre was almost abandoned to its fate. As a result, for many years now, the city has resembled a ship tossed helplessly on stormy seas. As central Athens grew in the characteristic manner of an disorder Mediterranean city, the market forces privileged the creation of entertainment zones and we saw phenomena of arbitrary and ruthless commercialization by unrestrained private developers, instead of the creation of well-planned residential areas for the middle classes. Continue reading
“Madre Terra- Migrant Trees” is a collaborative project by the Nomadic Architecture Network (Eleni Tzirtzilaki Stefanos Handelis), Georgia Traganou, Lydia Matthews, Natalia Roumelioti and Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani in cooperation with Parson’s, the New School for Design University. It comes as a sequel to “Open House”, an event presented under the umbrella of “Unbuilt”, the thematic series organized by SARCHA and hosted at the Byzantine Museum in Athens, Greece.
Scheduled to take place on June 22nd, the current project consists in the symbolic gesture of planting a tree and seeds in El Jardín del Paraíso, a community garden situated at the Lower East Side of New York city. We will of course make a toast for the occasion and offer food seasoned with herbs we cherish as a living memory of the places they/we come from: Eleni and Stefanos will bring along herbs not only from Greece but also from other places where they have lived, including Italy, Cuba and Portugal.
We will chart the paths taken by people over time that led them to the place they call home, the Lower East Side and we will talk about their gardening practices, daily life, how the community garden came to be etc.
What would better describe a human community than the tendency of its members to interact with each other on a continual basis? Martha Fleming points out the existence of many different kinds of communities: some engage in “activism” or form an “audience” or simply function as the “public” -and there are many meanings for the words I have used so far! In order to make sense, each thing ought to be understood in its proper context. The question of “Difference” is key to these issues.
My presentation will draw on the description of the human condition (la vita activa) by Hanna Arendt and her notion of human beings as a “zoon politikon” the political animal. In referring to the common world of institutions and spaces, she explains that only through the human fabrication of such a public sphere and the ensuing transformation of the world to a community of things are we endowed with a durable arena in which citizens may come together to engage in political activity. Special focus is placed here on “permanence, stability and durability” i.e. the qualities necessary for building communities based on a shared environment between people and across time. Continue reading
We participated in the Love Difference Pastries with the project «Pie, transformed pastries” which was the beginning of a dialogue on the occasion of the pastries in the wider Mediterranean region. Hospitality and sharing are two concepts that emerge through this project and, at the same time, define it. Especially the pastries, that is something more than the actual nutritional need, being this ‘something more’, shapes cultural relations either as dessert or as a treat or as an exchange. Continue reading
Location: Monastiraki Square
The action was a comment on immigration, providing the colorful paved ground of the square, so as to welcome hospitality and cohabitation within the city.
At the colorful cobbled square which symbolizes the multiculturalism of Athens, words were spread like borders, love, hospitality etc, in different languages of different nationalities to remind the need for communication and social gathering of the city’s nomads in this square which becomes a crossroad. The need to overcome fear regarding the foreign and the different… The words we wrote symbolize specific meanings that are essential for the city center. The rope wrapped around us symbolizes the borders we constantly meet and the desire to cross them.
By Nikos Papastergiadis
In the 1970s a large graffito appeared in Melbourne: ‘Wogs Run/Turn Cogs’.
‘Wog’ was the racist name for migrants from Southern Europe, and the graffito underlined their concentration in the work force as industrial labourers, linking their identity to the function of a cog in the machine. During this period it was also commonplace for migrants to describe the location of their identity as being split between two different places. For instance, Con George claimed that the migrant’s body was severed from his imagination: ‘While his body laboriously is and remains in the country of his involuntary adoption, his mind flies back and remains in the country of his origin.’
In John Berger’s classic study of the experience of guest workers in Europe, he begins his account of their arrival as if the migrant is a somnambulist:
… his migration is like an event in a dream dreamt by another. As a figure in a dream dreamt by an unknown sleeper, he appears to act autonomously, at times unexpectedly; but everything he does—unless he revolts—is determined by the needs of the dreamer’s mind.
Berger also notes that the repetitive and exhausting gestures undertaken in the industrial workplace lead to an effect whereby the ‘body loses its mind in the gesture’. The final image he offers in this penetrating account of the splitting of the migrant’s subjectivity is that of a person trapped in a state of bereavement, a state in which ‘everything [the bereaved person] sees reminds him of what he can no longer see; and what he is reminded of becomes the essential experience, not what he sees.’
Against this now familiar immigrant lament I would pose Arnold Zable’s account of a hunger strike against the Australian government’s policy of indefinite detention by Sri Lankan refugees on Nauru Island. Zable ends his plea for understanding of the traumatic consequences of indefinite detention by drawing attention to the placards that the refugees composed in which they describe themselves as ‘living corpses … walking zombies’. Mohammed Sagar, an asylum seeker who was held for seven years in an offshore camp, explained his predicament to a journalist in these terms: ‘I don’t want to be happy, I just want my life back … whether it would be happy or sad doesn’t matter. I just want it back. I want to be alive, that’s all, because now I’m feeling like a dead living thing.’ The fantasy of release from detention is therefore bound by the desire to return to the place of the ‘living’. However, even this modest hope is presented as a chimera in refugee Richard Okao’s account of living in Melbourne, ‘which is the city of the dead for me because it is the city where I realised that I was dead; that I wasn’t living’. Amal Masry, who survived the SIEV X disaster by clinging to a floating corpse, in which 353 people drowned when a people-smuggling boat sank on its way to the Australian territory of Christmas Island. After Masry was granted residency in Australia, she visited her son who was exiled in Iran. He recorded a video interview in which, with a shudder in her voice and a trembling hand placed softly over her heart, she recalled the horror of looking into the faces of the other refugees and thinking, ‘the color of their skin was bad, they were living but they were dead, like zombies’. Continue reading
Route: Walking along Kifissos river. Sailing. Travelling along Faliron coast and Psyttalia Island.
In this action the teams Urban Void, Nomadic Architecture Network, Flux factory and CUP walked with the participants along Kifissos river, in Faliro Bay, and at the mouth of Kifissos river and sailed through Faliro Bay towards the island of Psyttalia.
The area of Faliro Bay remains inaccessible from the city, starting from the Peace and Friendship Stadium (S.E.F) up to the Olympic facilities. An entire part of the coast, the Faliro Delta, remains a kind of a non-place, a cut-off piece, because the sports facilities are abandoned and the beach is a desertland. The mouths of Kifissos and Ilissos rivers are located there.
Location: Byzantine Museum
The “unbuilt” may be understood as something akin to Arjun Appadurai’s “imaginary” that harbors the potential to form new social realities that are envisioned by individuals or groups. A workshop stationed at the Byzantine Museum will aim to explore the” imaginary” dimension of inhabitation in the case of diasporic communities constituted across national borders, focusing on the agency of women. Populations today link themselves to wider constituencies of religious, ethnic or gender affiliation beyond national borders, and various diasporic public spheres become the crucibles of a postnational order. In fact, Saskia Sassen claims that it is precisely within the condition of globalization that disparate experiences of immigrant women acquire a “presence,” obtaining the potential for new cross-bordered collectivities to emerge. If homes, neighborhoods, cities, and nations have conventionally been spatial realms of identification and belonging, such relations are now becoming unstable, and new types of consciousness, realms of operation and allegiance are being sought.
Route: Koulouri square in Gkazochori- Polycarpou Street in Elaionas – Markoni. Suggestive actions at stop points.
The area of Elaionas, known from ancient times with the same place-name, that took it from the ancient olive grove of Athens, occupies the central part of the residential area of the capital (3 km from Omonia square). It connects the eastern with the western districts of Athens and this is the region with the longest industrial history. The area consists of Byzantine churches, factories, houses, olive trees and vineyards, archaeological findings and vacant spaces with no use. All these make up an un-built area, and can be characterized as the un-built zone of Athens. Because of its industrial characteristics (pollution, noise, etc.) it was not considered until now an area worthy of exploitation and as a result large parts of the area have been left un-built. This was soon reversed, because large parts of land at very low prices were attractive to the real estate industry, which will leave nothing un-built. Many Roma families were already kicked out of the area where the action took place. At that time it was announced that the new stadium of Panathinaikos as well as shopping malls etc. would be built in the area.
Wandering through spatial situations -actions in the area of Gazohori.
The project is based on the involvement of people that come together, and then to their involvement regarding the place and the metropolitan conditions, as well as their penetration in them.
Location: Koulouri Square, Gazohori
Along with the children of 87th intercultural primary school, a playground was designed in an empty plot across the main square which belongs to the municipality. Construction –action was implemented with soil, ropes, nets etc. Before the action we made collage designs and maquettes inside the school along with the children during the entire school year.
Location: reception Centre of asylum seekers in Lavrio
The apolis (citiless) keep increasing in the modern metropolis as more and more people leaving their place of origin. Without papers, refugees, immigrants, unemployed, homeless, marginalized groups, live as exiles in the postmodern metropolis, in its gaps. These cut-out environments are scattered, changing and fluid, as they are produced by the city itself and its transformations. Vacant spaces in the state of the right and generally in the idea of belonging. In such spaces that function as shelters within the city, the architect’s opinion is canceled and another opinion is formed, that of the fleeting, fluid, physical habitation. During this habitation features of community life are created- and these sites create another network that extends from the heart of the city up to the distant periphery.
Continue reading