A hymn to the Apolis... to the places where the citiless live...
Nomadic Architecture Network
citi-less(a-polis): the term is employed to put emphasis on the state of deterritorialization experienced in cut-off environments of modern cities.The citiless are increasing in number in the contemporary metropolis, as more and more people find themselves in a state of deterritorialization. Without documents, refugees, emigrants, the unemployed, the homeless, all marginal groups, are living as exiles in the post-modern metropolis, in its gaps. These cut-off environments are as disparate, unsettled and fluid as the city itself, and are created by the city and its transformations. Empty spaces with regard to the state of rights, and more generally, the idea of belonging. In these places, which function as refuge in the city, the words of architects are nullified, and another language is produced: that of ephemeral, fluid, corporeal inhabitation. The characteristics of communal life develop during this inhabitation, and these places create another network that spreads throughout the heart of the city to its distant outskirts.
The architect and the artist frequently take on the characteristics of a deterritorialized person as they are on the move and are frequently displaced by the social, cultural and financial establishment that questions them. For the intellectual, to seek these new spatial conditions in the metropolis, to determine anew the space and place, means to be exiled to the places where the citiless live. There, new identities and cohabitations are formed and the escape from the city takes place in its heart. The important thing is that in these new places, new spatial, ephemeral and disparate relations develop. The work we have created for this exhibition is based on our wandering through, and then brief habitation/action in these places. We choose communities with which we become involved and act as catalysts: the Reception Centre for Asylum Seekers in Lavrio (a panopticon type of construction with enclosure inherent in its spatial configuration); the bazaar that has developed in the former Korean market and the surrounding streets; the independent squats in the centre; the district of Menandrou and Koumoundourou Square; various immigrants' cafés and places in which the city queers gather are some of the places we explore with our direct empirical actions.
In these places, sites of translation are created. Lawlessness, immigration, diaspora and the mutation of these areas that are frequently dangerous, is the material for our deconstruction of the city. Our repositioning of the displayed spatial landscapes into a new psycho-geographical map innately includes the time and place we have experienced. With reference to this activity and experience, we could say that it is the mapping of our “Apolis Athens” that is being carried out. The direction, routes and hubs that we register become the meta-level and neural system of the action. The map becomes a strategic documentation of experience.
Abstract votive sculptures inspired by the ancient divinity Artemis, the goddess of otherness, are made to be eaten and become an exchange of trust among people. This object for barter, a symbol of hospitality, becomes the discourse of our interaction with people who briefly become entrapped in the crucial points that we place anew on the map. In exchange for the edible votive sculpture that we offered the members of an exiled community, they offered us selected objects. The role of the foreigner here is ambiguous, as the citiless foreigner at this particular time becomes the person who will briefly be our host.
Besides the map, the exhibition will include objects given as gifts, as well as the empty paper forms of the edible votive sculptures.
The project is evolving and changing continuously. The artist's glance, the architectural point of view, theoretical superintendence and the empirical situation coexist here.
Peggy Zali, Eleni Tzirtzilaki and Anna Tsaloufi-Lagiou worked together on this project – activities, works and texts – that that is being presented at the exhibition "Apolis" at Hellenic American Union curated by the artist Kostis Velonis (4-22 December).
Photo: from the project at Gazohori, summer 2006.