“A city is not gauged by its length and width, but by the broadness of its vision and the height of its dreams”
Herbert Eugene “Herb” Caen, american journalist (1916 – 1997).
Thomas Struth, Wall street - Dey street, New York 1978
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Evripidou
The function of vision is not merely imprinting a reflection of what is seen onto the brain, but rather it is in itself a mental process. The process is interpreted in the reformulation of the visual data, according to the rules and norms that have been created through experience and education, and are affected by factors such as one’s contemporary disposition. The American video artist Bill Viola mentions that: “The essential character of our relationship with reality does not lie in the visual impression but in the models of space and objects which the brain creates… the image is nothing but the source, the incoming data”. When we see a space, in reality we are directing our gaze upon several different points of it and the mental image which is shaped in our mind ultimately derives from the synthesis of all these partial images. A photograph usually has a subject: a face, a landscape, an object. On first viewing a photograph constitutes the presence of
Thomas Struth, Crosdy street, New York 1978 an imprinted reality. Yet the photographic image shapes a new environment, which constitutes for the spectator an experience equivalent to that of the real world. We can treat a photograph as part of a continuum of time and space, as an excerpt of a situation in progress. Representation presupposes a creative action. In other words, representation is the result of the creator’s intention. A photograph may contain a central theme with univocal organization and meaning. Often however we can detect in the interior of a photograph greater layers of information or small narratives which arise from the relationship between the theme’s elements or the relationship between the background and the theme. The floor is given to the image. The narrative of the reality of the space is rendered through the image. The images from the interior of a building mediate the narration of the city’s condition. The city’s pathogeny is revealed
through the camera’s descriptions, focusing on empty interior spaces. Through the static depiction of the offices, the corridor, the doorstep, the wall, the furniture, the piping, the reading of the whole is attempted through the detail. The scattered debris tell of an interlocution between time and space. A portrait of the past and its evolution into today. The predominant sound of Athens today is that of the unceasing degradation of its historical centre, which constitutes the main evidence of a wider socio-economical decline. The arbitrary privatization of public functions and spaces, the empty buildings and shops are some of the predominant problems that cannot be swept under a carpet of loquacious fallacy.
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A photographic lens focuses on the interior of an industrial building in the centre of Athens. In this way we can almost touch the city’s wounds. Between the present and the remnants of the past the only mediator is the camera. The focus on partial details in the interior of a building and the deliberate exclusion of the wider architectural spaces are related to the inclination towards attempting to listen to the faint whisper of the city through its dead cells and composing an element of a lived experience. Focusing your mind on one spot and the subsequent attempt to penetrate it is a way to comprehend the whole. The characterization of Athens’ historical centre as a dead zone is achieved through the photographic recording in the interior of an industrial building. The lens reveals a tattered shell, discarded and abandoned by everyone. A remnant of an older aesthetic, inextricably connected to the grand spectacle of prosperity and pro
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Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre, “The Ruins of Detroit”
duction that it had once been. Closed doors, ripped signs, scraped walls, broken windows, and a disemboweled interior are the images the camera records. The interior of the abandoned building suggests to us a dead limb cleaved from the body of a city. The spot focus captures and renders clashes, contrapositions and transcendences, which concern the entire body. If we suppose that the elements defining the objective space within the body of a city are: its geographical position, its scale, its boundaries and foundations, its population and the distribution of it into financial and social classes, the multiculturality. We find these very elements in the interior of a professional building, with only scale differentiating. This small dot on the city’s great body reveals that each and every thing develops around an axis, that of change, which unavoidably leads to an end. To the end of a social class, a professional guild, a condition of life, an everyday
routine and ultimately to the definitive end of the form of the past. To the end of the form of the body of a city which remains extant only through the traces it has left behind.
Timm Suess, “Lounge the night away�, Northern Italy
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In any case, this is not a biological and definitive end but mainly a “mutation� which leads, like clockwork, to a new form and a new beginning. The neglected building bids farewell to the older forms of its life and painfully enters a new era, that of the new order and modernization. The city transforms slowly but steadily. Its socio-economic character adapts, new forms of habitation and appropriation come to find their space within the outdated which is incontrovertibly fading. These new forms invade the debris of the old and something new is born. The City is reborn because it is a living organism. The City-body grows, changes, carries the same images for years, is attacked and altered. The City breathes uneasily because of the incessant interventions of our culture, it is rejuvenated and resists the interventions of contemporary man, it tries to manage and preserve its memory as true and original as possible. The greatest threat for the City is man, who most of the time intervenes selfishly and immoderately fatally injuring it. Despite all of this the City still preserves its live parts, it often vigorously defends them with the assistance of those who truly love it. It entwines the old with the new in respect and this makes us wish to traverse it, touch it and stay with it. The camera moves. The point of observation changes and so does the way of depicting the theme. The perspective of the space changes and therefore the sense of the space that the image conveys changes too. The result is a series of different images, an alternative representation of the space or the object. Until now the view of the city was from the interior of a building. The camera now moves to the level of the
street. The surrounding space acquires new meaning and the relationship of the street with its encompassed elements is presented. The plane opens up and reveals a series of images which offer a new narrative. In the mornings, when the day is good and the sidewalks are filled with people, one has the feeling of walking in a suspended city. Evripidou Street, with its old houses and their fading ochre. The large-scale construction of the city’s period of development which are worn and unsightly. You discern an atmosphere of transition and expectation. You want to escape. A lingering taste from the 19th century survives intact. Approaching the locked, boarded and ruined houses the wet scent of mold assaults the nostrils. You try to estimate their age. They were built between 1905 and 1912. Sometime around then. When the bourgeois Athenians still lived in this neighbourhood. Some of them, even older, scattered within the post-war cacophony, witnesses of King Otto’s era and the first chapter of the bourgeois
class. At the same time colourful images spring up from everywhere. People form a queue along the street. No one is in a hurry. They rub and smell some of the 2,500 herbs and spices which come from all across the globe. The image of Evripidou street swarming with people, colours and smells. Memories from the past and temptations from the present, together with a colourful mosaic of people from all the corners of the world, compose the image of the Historical Centre-Triangle of Athens. Evripidou Street lies right in the centre of this triangle. It constitutes the epitome of the modern history of the city but it also depicts elements of the face of modern Western culture. Both vendors and merchants try to sell their wares. The intense scents of spices, cured meats, and cheeses flood the air. The images acquire intense, vivid colours from the fresh delicacies of the little shops around. Evripidou Street. The street of spices or the “Little Orient” of Athens as they call it. This City is not dead. This city breathes and continues to live.
Bansky
Marcel Duchamp, Etant Donnes
“When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to master – that’s all”. Lewis Carroll