Street art, an offspring of the global metropolis and a product of its socio-urban fabric, has inevitably grown on, and been sustained by, urban architecture. Individual taggers and graffiti crews have proliferated in European cities since the 1980s. In the beginning, they mirrored their North American counterparts’ socio-political preoccupations that were a product of deteriorating socio-economic and socio-urban conditions in depressed sectors of metropolitan areas. In the early 1990s, however, with economic development and the beginnings of urban regeneration processes came the first large-scale mutation of tagging into ‘graffiti art’. With larger and more recognizable works, and visual rather than textual content, by the late 1990s graffiti was accepted by increasingly broader sections of urban population as ‘street art’. A new form of public art, street art could claim a legitimate part in the forming and transforming of urban identities in both their visual and their spatial iterations.
In the case of Athens, an ascending scale and scope of engagement between
commissioned graffiti art and architecture can clearly be traced during the years of
economic development leading to the Olympic Games of 2004. In a one by
one-and-a-half kilometre section in the northwest of central Athens as the area of
study [fig.
Area of Study. (Northwest Quadrant of Athens Historical Center)
In 1998, a few months after the Greek capital won the bid to host the 2004 Summer
Games, the country’s first international graffiti festival, an initiative of
the Hellenic-American Union, was held northwest of the Acropolis and the Ancient
Agora. The festival’s art was created on side façades and perimeter walls
of the neoclassical and postindustrial buildings along Ermou Street,
Also in 2000, four local graffiti artists were invited by Athens’ Goethe Institute to transform its atrium walls as part of its fiftieth anniversary events, signaling the first commissioned large-scale graffiti art project in Greece. Soon after, Goethe held a graffiti exhibition on its grounds called ‘Neverending Story’, pairing the work of those same artists along with international counterparts. The following year, under the auspices of the Municipality of Tavros, at the southwestern edge of central Athens, and with the support of Goethe and corporate sponsors, the same artists implemented two exterior murals on a pair of low-income housing apartment buildings. Significantly, the public was invited to not only attend a series of parallel events focusing on street culture, but also participate in the creation of the street art themselves, on side walls of the same buildings. Thus, two public institutions — a foreign cultural foundation and a state housing agency — invited graffiti artists to work on complete blank walls of existing buildings, demonstrating the transformative impact such initiatives can have in the perception of both intimate and larger interiors, both on individual buildings and on urban landscapes.
One of the artists in the Goethe and Tavros projects, Vangelis Hoursoglou (a.k.a
Woozy), had earlier established the group called Carpe Diem, to support graffiti
artists and to provide them with a legal basis as well as urban canvases. Active
since 1991 as Greece’s first graffiti crew, Carpe Diem became a legal
association and obtained a mandate to materialize its objectives in the spring of
2002 (
One of the six local artists involved in ‘Chromopolis’, known as Bizare,
was about to complete his studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts,
With the success of pre-Olympic large-scale graffiti art projects, now referred to as
street art by both the creators and the public, the genre began to proliferate on a
multitude of surfaces. Perhaps the most well-known project of this time is the mural
along the southern and western exterior walls of the ILPAP electric trolley-bus
depot, in the very heart of the area of study [fig.
Various Artists. “For a Sustainable City” (ILPAP Trolley Depot, detail), 2005. (85 Peiraios Street, Kerameikos)
In the tradition of Gothic sculptural exteriors or Byzantine mural interiors, these new ‘medieval cathedrals’ communicated to the urban masses of Olympic Athens a variety of sponsored visual narratives that their patrons wished to relay. While the agenda was certainly not religious, the social, political, economic and at times even ethical intentions of the commissioned art are more than evident.
Commissioned graffiti art was invited not simply to ‘beautify’ inhabited residential, commercial and industrial buildings and complexes across the center of Athens; such art was also intended to relay a number of messages to both local and visiting public audiences. As a result, during the years of economic downturn following the Games, a younger generation of street artists, who appropriated both new and older disused buildings, understood the power of architecture to display their noncommissioned work and make their intentions known to the city.
Initially, signs of the city’s reversal of fortune after the Games were few. In
the vicinity of the ILPAP depot and its didactic mural, along the streets of Psyrri
and Gazi in the southern half of the area of study, the period of economic growth
prior to 2004 left evident marks. Psyrri, a bohemian quarter once populated by
night-crawlers and riddled with seedy basements, was now a fashionable destination
of minimalist taverns and carefully designed bars. Gazi, a low-income cluster of
humble dwellings surrounding the old Gas Works factory that was transformed by the
Municipality of Athens into a cultural park called Technopolis, became the
city’s design and social Mecca.
Renovated and Disused Neoclassical Buildings. (15–17 Iasonos Street, Metaxourgeio)
It was at this moment that a number of street artists ventured out and transformed
vacant architectural ghosts in dilapidated areas, not only using them as sites for
their art, but including them as part of the art itself. A characteristic example is
the artist b., at the time a student of architecture.
b. “Untitled”, 2009. (16 Voutadon Street, Gazi)
The fountain of ‘cheerful mood’ in the city was drying up quickly, and
the artistic and architectural establishment finally took note of both the
commissioned and noncommissioned writings, and colors, on the walls. In 2006, the
DESTE Foundation, Athens’ most respected contemporary art institution,
announced plans for an exhibition titled
The art world did not stop there. The first Athens Art Biennale proclaimed, by means
of its title and theme, what was on everyone’s mind by the fall of 2007:
‘Destroy Athens’! The logic was simple. Existing in a wished-for
reality, Athens was refusing to accept its real image, one that not even the
Olympics had been able to alter. Beneath any residue of shiny surface, Athens was
still a socio-urban fabric of injustice, a place of increasing violence and
brutality, a fragmented world of inequality, but the city continued to romanticize
itself as a contemporary version of its fifth-century-BC predecessor.
Bizare’s impressive mural for
In the years following the end of the Olympic Games, therefore, street artists used the vast possibilities presented by the disused urban fabric to not only transport and instantly deliver their work’s meaning and message to the city, but also to express their generations’ (few) hopes and (numerous) fears, and to ultimately foreshadow the coming socio-economic crisis.
By the fall of 2008 it was evident that, as portrayed by Bizare during
Athenian street art was deeply affected by the city’s new plight. Artists turned not only to disused but also to destroyed architecture as their new urban canvas. Noncommissioned artists now carefully chose sites according to what message was to be conveyed and who the intended audience was. Unavoidably, artists became ever more political as their work emerged on the urban and architectural corpses. A sense of the unknown, of ‘what next’, waited at the end of the painted walls.
One characteristic example of site-specific work in the area of study is that of the
artist Sonke,
Sonke. “Untitled”, 2010. (2 Konstantinoupoleos Street, Gazi)
Closer to institutions that were directly linked with the crisis and its
socioeconomic iterations, examples of deeply political and politicized street art
emerged. This work focused not only on the theoretical crisis of finances,
percentages and numbers, but also on the real crisis of the people and the streets,
of the urban and social fabric, and of the welfare state, with the eminent collapse
of its decades-old institutions hovering above the city. The artist bleeps.gr,
bleeps.gr. “Forty Years of Debtocracy”, 2011. (Plateia Theatrou, Psyrri)
Athenian street art, which emerged from the world of graffiti and the urban
underground, has in fact a longstanding connection with the world of migrants and
‘others’.
Dimitris Taxis. “I Wish You Could Learn Something Useful from the Past”, 2012. (91 Kerameikou Street, Kerameikos)
Similarly, the artist WD (Wild Drawings), born and raised in Bali, Indonesia, arrived
in Athens in 2006 and almost immediately faced the beginning of the crisis, when his
wings, his aspirations for life in his new homeland, were
‘severed’.
As the socioeconomic crisis has taken hold, affecting central Athens more than any
other area around the country, street art has flourished on the decaying urban body.
The ever-increasing quantity and scale of street art parallels the ever-increasing
intensity of the unfolding state of emergency grappling and crippling the
socio-urban heart of Athens. Many of the emerging artists who worked in the area of
study since 2004, such as Bizare and b., belong to a new generation of urban
superheroes who are gaining national and international recognition,
Dimitris Taxis. “Floating above Our City”, 2010. (11 Agatharchou Street, Psyrri)
This first Athenian encounter between Greek and international graffiti artists came two years after the first national graffiti festival had been held in 1996 in Thessaloniki, the country’s second largest city.
For examples of this project, see
See ‘Stelios Faitakis’,
For examples of Bizare’s work, see
The mural, which was created during August and September 2005, and unveiled on the 22nd of September, was a collaboration of nine artists, six from Greece and three from Brazil.
The area’s reign on the city’s cultural and entertainment life further solidified in May 2007 with the opening of a new subway station in the heart of Gazi’s central square.
b.’s involvement with graffiti began in 1996 when, at the age of fourteen, he joined the tagging crew called Socially Rejected (conversation with street artists M.I. and N.B., 18 July 2012).
Especially abstract and geometric ones, such as the triangular sign for
‘danger’ (
b.’s first ‘graduation’, from tagging and graffiti to street
art, came soon after 2000 when he entered the School of Architecture at the
University of Thessaly in Volos (
b. completed these pieces in collaboration with Zoe Zillion, his life-partner at
the time (
See
For detailed biographical information on Dreyk, who was born in 1986, refer to
The curators proclaimed, ‘We feel that this persistent effort to present
any rupture, any violence and any deadlock as something that should not exist,
as something that does not belong to the constitution of the world and of the
subjects that inhabit it, is perhaps the greatest lie of our time’ (
Defined as ‘a conceptual guide for the process leading up to the
exhibition’ (
They maintained that the exhibition ‘does not wish to argue in favor of a
practice or against another [and] does not wish to predict where things are
heading right now or where they will be tomorrow’ (
The shooting and death in the central Exarheia district of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos by two policemen, followed by widespread demonstrations and rioting, in varied intensities, for almost three weeks.
The series of events occurred during the eighteen-month period from 6 December 2008 through September 2009 (elections and change in government), then until 5 May 2010. At the news of the country’s probable economic default and the signing of the first IMF/ECB/EU loan, between 100,000 and 500,000 people marched peacefully in Athens, and a second large wave of rioting occurred. Three people died inside a Marfin bank branch following the throwing of Molotov cocktails in the building. These events had a profound effect on Greek society in general and Greek youth in particular. The shock of the bank deaths numbed the momentum of protest for at least a year, but the country was subsequently catapulted into the center of the global financial crisis.
The string of mass peaceful demonstrations followed by fringe rioting and looting returned to Athens in June 2011. During the global ‘Indignant’ movement, inspired by student organizations across Southern Europe, the parallel events in Athens turned violent once again. With measures taken to secure the initial loan choking both the economy and society, and with the crisis deepening, extreme left and anarchist groups lead violent clashes. The city center was wounded in June and December 2011 during the three-year commemoration of the Grigoropoulos killing; the media was hungry for sensational images. A sentiment of disillusion sank in, as many searched for fresh targets to vent their frustration and anger. The void in the list of available answers was now to be filled by the other, long-silent, political extreme. The gradual rise of the extreme right in the shape of the fascist Golden Dawn party was made clear in February of 2012. After a parliamentary vote on a second, broader loan agreement between Greece and the EU/ECB/IMF, with harsher measures accompanying it, a 100,000-strong protest in Syntagma Square followed. Subsequent clashes were not only between the leftists/anarchists and the police, but also between protesters and the bullies of Golden Dawn.
Sonke began drawing on the streets in 1995, at the age of eleven. A few years
later, he started painting outside his neighborhood, mostly on metro trains and
in avenues around the northern suburb of Maroussi, before studying at a downtown
school of illustration (
Conversation with street artists M.I. and N.B., 18 July 2012. On the other hand, the princesses, while initially alone or accompanied by the equally sad prince, have since 2011 appeared in female pairs, or even become complete crowds of collective sadness.
As he himself has characterized his work (
Sonke’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition titled ‘Poor
Lovers’, held at the Hoxton Gallery in Gazi from 16 March to 3 May 2011.
Asked why he decided to abandon the streets and exhibit his work in a gallery,
he replied, ‘I didn’t think a lot about it, I mostly took it as
another chance to draw. A year ago I was drawing outside Hoxton, now I get a
chance to do it inside’ (
Active since 2003, the year he moved to the UK for studies at the Bristol Art
School, bleeps.gr keeps a low profile. He refuses to be photographed or give his
real name, and even has an art-curator colleague represent him in events where
his non-street art is available (
During a rare interview, bleeps mentioned that he is not only ‘interested
in reflecting the crisis and how it affects the lives of ordinary people’,
but is also ‘trying to get people to think more deeply about the
country’s dire situation, and to interpret more of what is going on’
(
During multiple encounters between bleeps and local law enforcement, the reported
result was of police congratulating the street artist for his work (
As if to verify his socio-economic and political beliefs, and his take on
Greece’s predicament, the manifesto on bleeps’ website reads,
‘The established motivation for every activity is money. The motivation
was never, after all, human beings. In a capitalist system, human beings have
learnt to think in terms of equivalence, subjugating their entire lives under
the law to give less than what you take as an exchange. Goods follow the
arbitrariness of hyper-value. The configuration of desires from consumers
gradually installs the power of the status quo. “I want what you are
selling to me because you can convince me that with that I will feel better and
more supreme”. In capitalism, if you are not a part of the bourgeoisie,
you are just a consumable unit. This system has to become more humane’
(bleeps.gr, ‘Manifest’,
Recognition and acceptance are hard earned and often come at a heavy price for youth interested in being on the ‘inside’, not unlike American hip-hop or even gang culture of the 1980s. However, Athenian street art has been more forgiving, accepting, and at times celebrating of difference and diversity.
Taxis’ (b. 1983) journey of migration to Greece is yet to become public knowledge.
While Taxis was, and still is, part of a crew called ‘GPO’, active in train and building tagging, his individual work has taken a more sensitive approach to its subjects, its audience, and the urban fabric it engages.
Taxis has also been active in Barcelona and Berlin, cities with more accommodating attitudes to graffiti and street art, and sites of significant developments in the unfolding of, and debate on, the crisis.
WD, whose real name is Dania, engaged with art early in life, from painting and
paper constructions at Balinese temples to coal drawing on the walls of his
home. He attended an art lyceum, and later the Bali School of Fine Arts, from
which he graduated in 2005 (
Unlike most Athenian immigrants, WD’s story has recently turned mainstream,
leading him to further art studies at the downtown Ornerakis School, following a
2010 graphic novel competition, award and scholarship led by
After his seminal ‘Socrates Drinks the Conium’ mural for