Georgia Psarrou (UCL) - 2023-24 Students
georgia.psarrou.23@ucl.ac.uk

The Haunting of Athens: Time, Memory and Political Cosmogony in Exarcheia, Greece

In 2019, the Greek government began ‘modernizing’ Athens’ Exarcheia neighbourhood to enable its progress from a ‘no-man’s land’, housing leftist radicals, to a ‘safe’ neighbourhood attracting more investors and tourists. While the state, embracing a linear temporality of progress, asks Exarcheians to await this bright future, some locals appear to experience time more cyclically as increased state intervention evokes memories of Exarcheia’s traumatic past of state violence. That is because, for some, this anticipated future includes an event of enormous political magnitude, underscored by state violence – an Event like the previous three that occurred in Exarcheia, in almost thirty-year intervals: the 1944 December Events; the November 1973 Polytechnic Uprising; and the December 2008 insurrection.

By focusing on this clash of temporalities this project aims to:

1. explore how political activists engage with different temporalities, through the construction of collective memory, to resist the state’s cosmogonic projects for the neighbourhood.

2. analyse how non-political actors involved in the efforts of modernizing the neighbourhood, construct and export their own ‘official’ histories of Exarcheia.

3. document how the (re)construction of their personal and communal pasts affects residents’ shared sense of community.

Though focused on Exarcheia, this project is not intended to be solely an ethnography of a neighbourhood in transition but, rather, an ethnographic exploration of the different ways in which people, in the face of uncertain futures, shape and utilize their past and, through it, reconstruct their cultural and political identities, create value systems and place economic growth, modernization and resistance within them. By thus shedding light on how people turn to time and memory as useful cultural tools for shaping their world, this projects hopes to offer new ways of thinking about resistance against the state as studies on this topic tend to focus on the struggles to transform space.

Primary supervisor: Martin Holbraad

Secondary supervisor: Dr Alex Pillen