Atlas of Athenian inscriptions: a book of drawings of writings and writings on drawings
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Date
05/07/2018Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
05/07/2021Author
Avramidis, Konstantinos
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Abstract
This thesis proposes a critical exchange between architecture and graffiti. Graffiti in Athens
plays a key role in the expression of Greek tensions making this city an ideal place for developing
such an exchange. The author acts in a three-fold manner in this research: as architectural
designer, one with an impulse to survey by drawing and capable of grasping the matrix
of the surfaces upon which graffiti finds an expression; as graffiti writer, somebody with some
practical experience as graffitist hence partially equipped to decode the graffiti matrix placed
on any given architectural matrix; and as writer on graffiti, who is interested in bringing together
and working between the architectural and graffiti matrices to reveal their convergences,
deviations and interdependences, and, in so doing, expose the hidden spatiality of graffiti
writing. Stemming from this peculiar triple positioning, this book promotes a new situating
of Athenian inscriptions. The thesis is presented as an Atlas of Athenian Inscriptions, a book
of drawings of writings and writings on drawings. The Atlas offers, in both drawn and written
form, a close study of four situations in which graffiti has been recorded.
The thesis regards a recent significant graffiti Exhibition – in which the author is actively
implicated by being invited into it as a graffiti writer and writer on graffiti – as a starting
point, as its situation zero. By de-situating graffiti from its original urban and political context
whilst placing it onto the gallery surfaces, this thesis argues that the Exhibition undermines
graffiti’s critical potency and has transformed graffiti into an aesthetic object. However, perhaps
paradoxically, presenting graffiti as an empty gesture, the Exhibition nonetheless raises
questions concerning the situating role of graffiti. By including it in the Atlas together with
the following more overt surface ruptures in political edifices, the Exhibition is framed as an
equally political situation. The other three situations, all in Athens’ city centre, reflect three
important periods in local political history and are emblematic in that they are the epicentres
of historical ruptures during which they are extensively graffitied: the former Nazi Detention
Centre which operates during the Axis occupation (1941-1944); the Athens Polytechnic that
plays a pivotal role in the student uprising against the Greek Military Junta (1967-1974); and
the Bank of Greece HQ building which is a site of recurring political expression in contemporary
crisis (2010-2015).
The Atlas indexes graffiti and related information from the city of Athens, the systematic
organisation of which creates different graffiti-related matrices allowing us to make
sense of, navigate in and reconstruct the Athenian graffiti landscape through characteristic
surface environments. By placing different political situations in the same set with the Exhibition,
the thesis aims to give critical voice to how graffiti is perceived. By resituating (graffiti)
images, the Atlas restores broken and creates new links between them and their surfaces
whilst revealing not only the spatiality of graffiti in Athens but also the spatiality of architecture
of Athens as a recurring tension between the matrices of dissensus and consensus. The
thesis deconstructs the mythology that architecture represents consensus and graffiti dissensus,
since each is embedded in the other. Ultimately, by carefully considering graffiti’s situating
character and graphic articulation, this research promotes rupture to the smoothing of its
political asperity attempted by architecture, institutions and those writing on graffiti that seek
to restrain it.