resistance – To Archeio https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 04 May 2020 23:23:58 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 Doing economic relations otherwise https://toarcheio.org/items/doing-economic-relations-otherwise/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:23:58 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/doing-economic-relations-otherwise/ Continued]]> Recent scholarship on Southern Europe focuses on economic crisis and contestations of hegemonic economic and political arrangements. Solidarity features prominently in these accounts as a notion of opposition to austerity and recession. This article uses solidarity as an entry point, and then shifts attention to the everyday politics of its enactment in the TEM complementary currency network. The article presents three sets of challenges faced by network members: moral discourses around debt, disregard of communal labour and hierarchies created through economic inequalities among network members. The discussion of these challenges places resistance and solidarity in larger discussions about capitalist economies and hegemonic thought and practice that go beyond the discussion of solidarity in Greece and Southern Europe.

]]> ‘Welcome to the civilization of fear’: on political graffiti heterotopias in Greece in times of crisis https://toarcheio.org/items/welcome-to-the-civilization-of-fear-on-political-graffiti-heterotopias-in-greece-in-times-of-crisis/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:38 +0000 http://arc.local/items/welcome-to-the-civilization-of-fear-on-political-graffiti-heterotopias-in-greece-in-times-of-crisis/ Continued]]> Drawing upon ethnographical research carried out in Greek cities, this article discusses the use of political graffiti as a creative, playful response to the economic depression, social upheavals and precariousness surrounding the writers and as an act of civil disobedience and political protest in the context of the Greek economic crisis. The graffiti creation releases a flood of cultural responses to the crisis and gives an insight into the lived experience endured by the Greek people faced with the gloomy conditions of a society in crisis. The analysis traces the ways in which activists and unaligned writers turn their attention to the creative and expressive potential of graffiti and articulate cultural heterotopias on the visual landscape of Greek cities. Spatial politics allow distinctive political voices to transform the material dimensions of urban life in meaningful visual expression. The act of doing graffiti in the dystopia of crisis shows the desire of grassroots artists and cultural activists to use their creative capacities to overcome the unfavourable material conditions of their existence and to build alternative counter-hegemonic spaces of representation in the urban landscapes, challenging austerity policies and the existing social order.

]]> Is the crisis in Athens (also) gendered?: Facets of access and (in)visibility in everyday public spaces https://toarcheio.org/items/is-the-crisis-in-athens-also-gendered-facets-of-access-and-invisibility-in-everyday-public-spaces/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:30 +0000 http://arc.local/items/is-the-crisis-in-athens-also-gendered-facets-of-access-and-invisibility-in-everyday-public-spaces/ Continued]]> As the Greek crisis deepens and ‘recovery’ is constantly postponed to an unknown future, a dominant discourse seems to consolidate which focuses almost exclusively on macro-economic arguments and concerns. Other aspects of the crisis, among which are its gendered facets and unequal effects on women and men, rarely permeate the allegedly ‘central’ understandings. With the possible exception of unemployment which fares high among left-wing analysts, gender is thought to pertain to a ‘special’, that is, less important, matter which may detract from the ‘main problem’. The paper draws together a series of stories of ordinary women who have experienced deep changes in their everyday lives as a result of austerity policies (unemployment, precarity, salary and pension cuts, shrinking social rights, mounting everyday violence). It argues that emphasis on this scale ‘closest in’, linked in multiple ways to many other scales (local, national, European, international), reveals areas of knowledge that would otherwise remain in the dark; and that connecting concrete bodies with global processes enriches our understandings with more complex and more flexible variables and informs the ‘big pictures’ (in this case about the Greek crisis)—and not only the reverse.

]]> From streets and squares to radical political emancipation? Resistance and lessons from Athens during the crisis https://toarcheio.org/items/from-streets-and-squares-to-radical-political-emancipation-resistance-and-lessons-from-athens-during-the-crisis/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:18 +0000 http://arc.local/items/from-streets-and-squares-to-radical-political-emancipation-resistance-and-lessons-from-athens-during-the-crisis/ Continued]]> The current crisis with imposed austerity measures hit Greece in 2009. People in large cities such as Athens were the first victims. Resistance took various forms including mobilizations and fights in the streets and squares of Athens. Although to some extent spontaneous in the beginning, these mobilizations were not without political preparation (at least for some participants) and this partially explains both their intensity and stability and the violent police reaction. Resistance and anti-austerity mobilizations were outcomes of non-politicized people coming together with various more organized political forces, such as unions, non-unionized temporary workers, antiracist and anti-global movements, members of the European Social Forum-Greek section, small leftist and anarchist groups, plus larger political parties of the left such as SYRIZA, which succeeded in forming a wider radical alliance. In this alliance the role of radical social movements, including urban movements, has been decisive. During the past 10 to 15 years dozens of urban grassroots movements emerged in the Athens metropolitan region. Partly as a response to projects related to the 2004 Olympic Games, and partly in response to chronic socio-spatial inequalities and injustices in various neighborhoods, these movements were radical in nature, multi-class in social base and quite militant in terms of tactics. And since 2009, the crisis acted as catalyst, and radical social movements made the crucial link between sectoral/local struggles and those arising from wider socio-spatial contradictions and injustices aiming at political change. The paper critically evaluates these events, putting them in theoretical and comparative perspective, trying to understand the limits and the lessons-so-far from such an experience and asks whether they point to a wider radical political emancipation.

(PDF) From streets and squares to radical political emancipation? Resistance lessons from Athens during the crisis. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266686312_From_streets_and_squares_to_radical_political_emancipation_Resistance_lessons_from_Athens_during_the_crisis [accessed Aug 22 2018].

]]> Athens 2012: performances ‘in crisis’ or what happens when a city goes soft? https://toarcheio.org/items/athens-2012-performances-in-crisis-or-what-happens-when-a-city-goes-soft/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:15 +0000 http://arc.local/items/athens-2012-performances-in-crisis-or-what-happens-when-a-city-goes-soft/ Continued]]> Resistant performances in Athens have gathered momentum over the last year, transforming the fixed landscape of a city into a platform for negotiation and dialogue. The singular compelling imagery of ‘occupying’ as a form of resistance is its multiplicity of voices—the collective mobilisation of the ‘multitude’. Yet, the force and urgency of a collective resistance lies in the individual untold stories of its proponents. Rather than glorify the movement as a faceless entity, this paper embraces the daily stories, struggles and wounds of occupation, by using photographs. Resistant performances are connected with existing social conditions: austerity measures, mass immigration and ‘crisis’. Such narratives of globalisation and empire building are transforming central areas and traditional notions of Athenian identity, giving birth to a new street-level language that has twisted, innovated and filled in the gaps of a culture’s hegemonic discourse. The paper analyses both protests and specific examples of street art as visual markers of the shifting, complex discourses of power struggles, marginality and counter-cultures that establish a new reality that must be seen and heard.

]]>