“Athens Report” is an interactive documentary and installation project, using digital media and the Internet to collect and archive interviews, video, photographs and graffiti of life and protest in Athens during the Greek debt crisis.
Athens Report is an online collective project based on crowdsourcing and conceived by visual artist, Anna Lascari. The online platform collects and archives videos, photographs, graffiti and interviews on an interactive video map of the route of a trolley bus no. 11. The archive material, constantly updated by the users, focuses on riots, protests and social actions that took place in the public space of Athens from December the 6th, 2008, date of the assassination of 15 year-old student Alexandros Grigoropoulos from the police in the area of Exarcheia, to September the 25th 2015, date of the reform of a coalition government by the left wing party SY.RIZ.A with the right wing party of AN.EL.
Trolley bus no. 11 travels across the city center connecting neighborhoods with significant role to the sociopolitical history and the urbanization of Athens such as Pangrati, Exarcheia and Kypseli. Sewn on the video route and affixed to the area where they have been captured, videos and photographs are being continuously uploaded by individuals and collectives who were actively engaged in the public space from 2008 to 2015 producing their own narratives on the experience of Athens as a city in “crisis”, a subject of global media attention and a battleground. Users are invited to upload their own visual material that documents street work, protests, riots and street art.
The archive, indicatively classified within the urban map aims to leave space for its countless interpretations to emerge. The horizontal categorization of the digital documents by their distinct affinities with the psychogeography of the city pursues free schemes of engagement by the users who develop the archive themselves by uploading their own material. As an interactive documentary project, Athens Report strives to embody in its archive the ruptures, the intended and unintended exclusions or inclusions and reflect the impulsiveness that occurs in the process of the documentation.
Focusing on setting up preconceived notions on what defines revolt in a “society in crisis”, dominant discourse excluded a matter that emerges over the events: the reclaim of public space and the re-establishment of a new relationship between people and their city. The crowdsourcing archive of Athens Report originates from this relationship, instigating from the particularity of the personal inscription to create space for the common and the shared experience. In this peculiar historiography of the city of Athens, the platform attempts to create a multiple reflection in the digital world. Moving back and forth, between the past and the present on a perpetual trolley route, the archive imprints the social actions and incidents that produce public space and at the same time incorporates the very processes and gestures that conduce to its production.
Athens Report can be conceived as a common ground, built through the visitors’ experience of urban space and protest. Apart from offering accessibility and enhancing participation, technology here intermediates between public space and virtual world towards the extension in the virtual world via establishing digital communities. On this common web terrain we invite you to take part, explore the parameters of producing knowledge, form, study and question relations of power, stretch the limits between the physical and the virtual and develop a community from the digital space to the urban environment and vice versa.
Athens Report is an open source project and it is licensed under the Creative Commons license: Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative version 4.0
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