Suchergebnisse

The fourteenth edition of documenta, the international exhibition of contemporary art, introduced in the cultural field of Greece a strong statement about the country being part of the Global South. Traditionally, documenta takes place every five years in the German city of Kassel. Yet the fourteenth iteration in 2017, titled 'Learning from Athens', was equally split between Kassel and Athens. As documenta is considered the world's most important manifestation of contemporary art, already for more than two decades its artistic directors try to make the exhibition project globally relevant. As every edition, so also the fourteenth, was accompanied by several publications that constructed a rich theoretical framework. Four years after the exhibition project's finissage, this article revisits the magazine of documenta 14, titled South as a State of Mind, in order to reflect on the conception of the terms 'South' and 'Global South' proposed there in relation to the situated Athens-based perspective. As the documenta 14 motto reassured, this was an exercise in 'learning from Athens' between 2013 and 2017: how productive did this perspective render conceptualizations of the South for the past, present or future? And what role did the intense context of the 2010s in Greece play in such conceptualizations, in the midst of the country's sovereign debt crisis, waves of refugees and social and political turmoil?

The article argues that since December 2008, the continuous presence in public space in Athens and the spectacular mediatization in news reports, of various forms of the so-called anomie, as well as (since 2012) of its spectacular and violent repression by the police, were instrumentalized by the Greek austerity government in an attempt to enhance and manipulate already existing feelings of precarity among the population. Organized police operations in public space were turned into 'media events'. Specifically, 'affective precarity' is considered as a way of demobilizing precarity as a politically and economically operative concept. The article adopts Lauren Berlant's analysis of the relation between precarity and the austerity state.