Event

On Counter-Resistant Practices: Transcending Agreed-Upon Territorial Identities

On 8 April 2017, a container was placed in Exarchia Square as part of the actions of the Exarchia Square Re-appropriation Committee, with the aim of functioning as a political kiosque. A few months after the succession of the SYRIZA government by the New Democracy, on 20 September 2019, the removal operation took place, as the first intervention of the new government in Exarchia Square. The mainstream media make sure to offer live coverage of the removal of the container, or the “Anarchist Service Center”, as journalists call it. According to the latter, it is the first time in years that these media have such access to the square, as until then, Exarchia have been considered “off-limits” for agents of institutional power. 

The sealing of the container momentarily turns it into a kind of cenotaph, a mnemonic device for all the efforts made towards a collective appropriation of the symbolic center of Exarchia. Its subsequent removal is considered to mark the beginning of a site-specific memory format, reaching our days in the form of the symbolic exhumation of all the elements that have defined the decades-long conceptual stratification in this “urban void”. What could be recognized as desecration is presented as an exorcism, aiming to satisfy the carriers of a social superstition. 

Drawing on their personal involvement in the original project of repurposing and installing the container, the creators attempt a peculiar dialogue between their personal archive and the archives of news reports where journalists describe, comment on and provide representations of the process of its removal. By presenting footage of the reconstruction and installation of the container, along with archival footage of the overall design of this spatial intervention, juxtaposed with the posterior selective representations of a schematized redundancy, the creators highlight the dipoles of purity and dirt, institutional and arbitrary processes, nature and society, and high and low art and theory, among others. The dialogue creates a critical and political condition with reference to the eccentric “queer art of failure”, highlighting the multiple qualities of the implicitly placed “matter out of place”.

The work is a study on “counter-aesthetics” forms of resistance, reaching for the possibility of the Other that lies beyond any agreed upon or conformist narrative. Using low/high theory and practices that are situated within the “slash punctuation mark”, it emphasizes the importance of recognizing the sub-cultural and the marginal as alternative sources of knowledge. It promotes the recognition of the wildly poetic in the frustratingly real cultural stock.

Whispers of the Royal Stream

On a mild midday, we gathered outside Queen’s Park Station, where Kilburn’s hidden stream would have begun. Standing on the threshold between the boroughs of Westminster and Brent, we set out to walk pondering how in/visibility shapes socio-cultural identities and urban stories be it in Nicosia or Kilburn.

We moved to William Dunbar House, its brutalist façade rising stark against the sky, and reflected on how regeneration policies have transformed social housing into sleek marketing suites. Around the corner, the stories shared at the UK Albanian Muslim Community & Cultural Centre echoed these shifts, weaving together threads of unhomeliness and politics of identity.

At Shanzelize Restaurant, the conversation turned to the fantasies born of in/visibility. Shop names whispered promises of “the good life,” both alluring and unattainable, mirroring the dreams of countless migrants. Along these spectral borders, we traced how communities reclaim space, reshaping the unseen into something tangible.

Outside the former Biddy Mulligan’s Pub, now Ladbrokes, we talked about the 1975 bombing—a deep wound that scarred the Irish community, many of whom had come to Kilburn to build roads and carve out new lives. Yet, from that fracture, their resilience emerged, weaving off-modern tales into Kilburn’s ever-shifting fabric.

We ended at Kiln Theatre and Camden Art Centre, where creativity dances on the edges of the buried river, its presence lingering as a faint dampness in the air. Here, at the threshold of seen and unseen, we glimpsed the quiet power of these liminal spaces, where urban stories drift like murmurs through the folds of time and place.

March 2-3, 2023

Graduality and (Mis)Interpretation

On March 2-3, 2023, I attended SpaceX-Rise’s ‘Training Event 3’ in Dublin. As with all events I attended in this series, the encounter proved far more conceptually interesting and useful to me than the term ‘training’ would normally suggest – associated as it is (in my mind, at least) with the kinds of institutional compliance type activities that, as academics with our minds elsewhere, we are all compelled to participate in.

Across two days, the event brought together scholars, practitioners, and activists across various fields in seminar discussions, art exhibits and performances, as well as a wonderful visit to a local community group trying to envisage new and anti-capitalist ways of being.

As a sociologist very much out of my comfort zone, and for reasons that go to the heart of why this project is important, one experience in particular stayed with me. A theme that had been emerging over the course of the event – unintentionally, I think – was that perennial debate over revolution vs. reform, with apparently little appetite for the latter among this staunchly left-wing group of thinkers. The recurrence of this theme seemed to me to be an interesting product of the tension between the revolutionary spirit widely and openly shared among participants, and the actual work being undertaken which, in order to achieve anything, is always forced to compromise with the world ‘as it is’.

In the middle of all this was one art exhibit – or performance, or both/neither; I’m a sociologist, so I’m not sure what the correct terminology is – that effortlessly captured, perhaps even sought to resolve, this tension.

We found ourselves, probably thirty attendees all up, scattered at the edges of a large exhibition space, sharing it with various moveable rectangular blocks that easily dwarfed the space’s human inhabitants. It felt like it was meant to communicate, in minimalist form, the experience of inhabiting any (post)modern urban space – though again, as a neophyte, I’m not sure I interpreted any aspect of this work as intended. To be honest, I’m not even sure I’m providing a fully accurate account of what took place.

The artist then proceeded to walk slowly across the space for around twenty minutes, shifting blocks here and there, while telling us some sort of story – the details of which I didn’t fully understand and can’t remember – about time, space and graduality. It was an utterly captivating, meditative, and for me, also puzzling experience. And by the end of it, the space had been completely transformed by the artist’s gradual re-ordering of the large blocks.

I’m quite certain that the artist didn’t intend this to be the meaning, but they nonetheless made a very convincing case for that much-maligned (on the left) concept of reform – the ways in which we can and do remake the world gradually, often imperceptibly, and with the little more than a narrative and the materials we inherit from the existing structures and cultures we seek to depose.