The Home of Civil Disobedience
Consistent with the narrative of the reactionary, vibrant, passionate... the poor but honest, the fighting, emancipated crowd of Athens, is a piece of the “exotic reading”. In the eyes of Western leftists both the image of the indignant Syntagma Square, and the imagery of the Exarchia neighborhood, are parts of a heroic reading of modern Greece and the Greek people as objectification models of the popular concept of civil disobedience. The design of my day for the project was made through a reenactment of a walk I had with an American friend in the streets of Exarchia, remembering our conversations and his reactions to the scenery.
Initially I noticed the ways in which romantic tendencies and readings naturally oppose rationalization and integrates the "exotics" in a context of imaginary identity. When Martin Heidegger finds himself in the Black Forest, he is removed from rationalization as he faces the fulfillment of his pastoral fantasy. Ιn his objectified subject, the observer projects underlying features that are missing from them, and by projecting their desires on what he hopes to identify with is thus redefined -through a unilateral arbitrariness- as a potentially romantic subject.
The question that arises is whether such readings eventually produce a national oration when they project on the "irreconcilables" who perform civil disobedience characteristics appropriated also by the Greek Right wing: "reactionaries," "Do not bow their head," "know how to live", " poor but honest ".
Does such gaze affect local identity? Does the characteristics imparted by the observer form a reactive, introverted narrative that somehow ties the social fabric under attributes defined as national?
A narrative in which Prekas in Roupel is part of the same story with the protesters in Syntagma Square, and King Leonidas with Nikos Romanos ... And is it for all of them Churchill said that heroes fight like Greeks etc etc?
