In 1970 the artist Gordon Matta Clark bored a hole through a house and Walter De Maria filled a room with dirt; more recently, Rachel Whiteread created a concrete replica of a condemned Victorian house in situ in East London. The young people on the Attic Highway are digging a cylindrical tunnel to connect the shared walls of the houses slated for destruction. In my opinion, it’s an important gesture. It reminds us of how much we’ve lost, and how much more we’re willing to lose, in the name of progress, of consumption, of that hotly desired “privacy” that gets packaged and sold as a luxury item, yet actually prevents us from living together, united.
“The street is a place for us to live, eat, talk, sleep,” these young people say. “The street has a history of its own,” people of our generation used to sing at anti-dictatorship protests in the ’70s. But who remembers that slogan today? The street has become an abandoned stage-set that we hurry across without the least twinge of emotion, on our way somewhere else, alienated from our own footfalls, from the urgent situation of the present moment. Public squares have become sites for the deafening hubbub of festivals organized by city officials, supposedly “for the people.” But when the festival is spontaneous and improvised, decentralized and unpredictable, then it becomes an annoyance. A danger, even. The images of riot police standing by, of bulldozers lined up face to face with the bonfires of the young people’s jubilant celebration brings to mind moments in this country’s past that we simply don’t want to relive.
Op-ed column by Gerasimus Pantazis,
Professor of Sociology at Panteion University
The Daily Post
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TRAGEDY ON THE ATTIC HIGHWAY
Thirty-five-year-old mother fights for her life
It was as if there were a war on. Tear gas everywhere, a battle scene. At the height of the clashes on the Attic Highway, at one in the morning, a few policemen fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd. One bullet, which seems to have gone astray, ended up in the temple of the unlucky Anna Horn, an artist who played an active role in organizing the demonstrations, and the mother of a six-year-old girl. She was rushed by ambulance to a hospital in Kifisia, where doctors have been struggling to keep her alive. The next twenty-four hours, they say, will be critical. The wounded woman is the wife of successful architect Aristomenis Malouhos, known for his office complexes along Kifisias Avenue, and the daughter of well-known philosopher Stamatis Horn, who lived and worked in Paris during and after the dictatorship.
In the wake of this tragic event, the protestors dispersed. The demolition of the remaining homes will commence tomorrow morning. Apart from the buildings themselves, workers are now faced with the piles of trash left by “environmentalist” protestors, who fought for a better tomorrow with beer cans and paper bags. .
Bela Psaraki
The Afternoon Post
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A FAREWELL TO ANNA
Who was Anna Horn? An everyday saint whose name was unknown until yesterday? An incurable romantic who fought for a better tomorrow? Over the past few days we’ve seen her on the news, infinitely repeating the only statement of hers which — to their great luck — television crews had recorded, so that they are now able to give a face to the name of the woman murdered in cold blood by a policeman’s bullet. “We all have to show courage and faith in our ideals,” she said. “We have to literally embody our emotions if we’re going to act politically. New technologies have marginalized the body. There’s nothing more dangerous than that. We here are going to fight with our bodies, because it’s the only thing we have left.”
And Anna Horn did in fact fight with her body. Beautiful militant, mother and intellectual, her multifaceted image has already been so thoroughly circulated as to end up a stereotype. Old photographs from her days as an art student in Paris, statements from friends and acquaintances, even some of her father’s writings about the anarchist movement in Europe have been deployed. But what lesson can we learn from Anna? What did she leave behind, apart from a young daughter and an adoring husband?
What Anna Horn left behind is a deep distrust of the Greek police, and by extension of the entire state apparatus — a state apparatus that once again reacted to tragedy in a way that can only leave us speechless. A press release by the Minister of Public Order reads, “We must learn from this mistake. It is in our best interest as a nation not to dwell on a single event, but to consider and assess the overall effort.” This “overall effort” apparently refers to the muzzling of thousands of protestors (roughly 2,500 were present on the night of the shooting) who had come to express their anger and bitterness at the way the state machine is organized, at the passivity of political life. To express, too, their nostalgia for a way of life they are being asked to abandon in order to make way for the forces of progress and prosperity signaled by the grand Olympic building projects.
What else did Anna teach us? That we still have bodies, which we can use as political tools. That an overexposure to mass media achieves precisely the opposite of bodily political action: we watch instead of taking part. That the ideology of the lone revolutionary no longer applies, that there isn’t just one form of revolutionary thought. Beneath their kerchiefs, behind their names, the young (and not-so-young) demonstrators on the Attic Highway taught us the postmodern political language of the masses, taught us to accept states of contradiction, taught us that the era of solitary leaders is over. No more tidy marches organized by trade unions, no more dogma, no more replacing of one power structure with another that’s even worse. The biggest challenge faced by anti-globalization movements is an internal one: if the reformist left prevails at the expense of these grassroot, anti-establishment trends, then we’ll simply continue to breed cosseted unionists with no real impulse to fight the reigning institutional framework of representative “democracy.” In which case every radical attempt at regeneration will fail. All that will remain in a hierarchy of this sort will be the leisurely demonstrations of the middle class (who have money to travel to the places where World Bank summits are held) and the occasional quaint little article in the daily paper. .
Something else that Anna taught us: that the act of occupying the street at this particular historical moment is the end result of multiple processes — and while rapt art historians and theorists have noted the theatrical value of this act over the past several days, it also has a certain pragmatic value, which lies in the (albeit temporary) disruption of the work crews, and in the difficulties created for the system, if only for a few days.
If we all become romantic troublemakers, Anna Horn won’t have to feel alone.
From an op-ed by Despina Arvaniti
The Free Press
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THE REAL REVOLUTIONS OF ANNA HORN
I’ve known Anna Horn since we were kids. We used to play together during recess. What times those were! Dressed in school uniforms, we swapped hair clips and zodiac crackers. It was 1977. No one could resist the charm of our new classmate who arrived from Paris and spoke to us with such aplomb about the Café de Flore and real butter croissants. Petros Misiakos, today the director of a major software company, wanted to marry her. Maria Papamavrou, whose installations have in the past decade breathed new political life into the art world, was content to live in her shadow. And me? Anna taught me lessons of radical elegance — I begged my mother to buy me tortoiseshell barrettes, which in those days you could only find in major European cities.