Walkthelaw, Performative walk, Οrganized by Counterpublics @ H(e)avens, Athens, Saturday 09 December 2023

Walkthelaw

Performative walk (in Greek)
Οrganized by Counterpublics
Saturday 09 December 2023, 11:45- 14:00
Meeting point: Line 1 station, Kato Patisia
H(e)avens, Athens https://heavens.gr/en/saturday-en/

Contributors:
Walk: Constantina Theodorou

Interventions- performative actions: Dimitris Georgakopoulos, Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Yorgia Karidi, Giorgos Papadatos, Anna Tsouloufi-Lagiou, Dimitris Halatsis, Constantinos Hadzinikolaou

 

The action aims to highlight the dissonance between the fine print, the terms hidden in legal texts, such as public space concession contracts, redevelopment plans, and the vibrant life of public space that they try to tame, abuse and ultimately eliminate.

The choice of the route focuses on points-spaces linked to institutional interventions and actions, retrieves from the legal texts the details, the lines, the phrases that set the background for the encroachment of space, contrasts them in the field, attempts a connection between the letter of the law and what this implies for the “living” public space. The long, difficult to read, complex legal texts with their technical language conceal the characteristics of the urban reality that is established by various kinds of agreements, contracts, redevelopment plans. The legal text performatively accomplishes the forthcoming encroachment of public space, the opening of public space as a field of profitability, as a field of cultural hegemony and ultimately the alteration of its very character, as institutions transfer and impose an ethos/relationship of private space on public space, negating the fundamental condition of its existence, the possibility of conflict and negotiation.

At the same time, the route retrieves personal archives, minor stories linked to the sites of institutional interventions, spatial practices and projects of autonomy that have been lost. Through each artistic intervention there is an allusive juxtaposition of a public space born out of conflict and confrontation and the one-dimensional space described by the official plans. Walking brings back the memory of a co-produced space, it is an attempt to re-enact an experiential territory.