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.