Performative Resilience: Artistic Activism in Urban Spaces of Athens

Abstract

Multiple constraints and passivity in urban space on a global scale, combined with the transformation of economic crises into spatial crises, have often led to a rise in civic participation as a form of radical response to contested social frameworks. In a number of cases, as these frameworks faced collapse, citizens have been led to bottom-up solutions which test their capacity to shape socio-spatial programs and disrupt the formality of space freeing it from constraints. Resilient cities – defined as cities that have the ability to absorb, recover and prepare for future shocks – are often at the epicenter of such multi-layered transformations. This paper explores some of the practices deployed by cultural practitioners (performers, visual artists, activists, architects etc.) in Athens, Greece as a response to conditions of austerity and political turmoil, as well as methods which could be deployed towards the re-appropriation of public space within oppressive socioeconomic and political contexts through empirical research. For the purpose of this analysis, ‘performance’ refers to a number of temporal kinesthetic actions of resilience that attempt to critique and interrogate sociopolitical narratives in public space. Through daily performative actions, groups of citizens attempt to rethink public space in order to confront newly urgent social needs and normalised behaviors. Cultural practitioners and urban activists, initiate performative actions as an attempt to demonstrate their resilience and capacity to adapt to austerity and crisis, pushing the boundaries of what public space can accommodate, examining complex social transformations in spatial terms.