You were very lucky to take this photograph of a wall-text without a work. That said, you still visited several empty universities across the city – the Academy, the Lyceum and the Stoa Poikile. And, like this empty university, there was still activity on the site – a children’s party at Plato’s, an art collective’s […]
How many photographs of these iconic floor-texts did you take? Were there times when you merely took a photograph of one and then walked on past the work it was related to? Were you every tempted to steal one of the blocks with the artist’s name on it? If so, which artist would you have […]
You didn’t eat at Rasheed Araeen’s Shamiyaana–Food for Thought: Thought for Change in Kotzia Square. You did, however, visit it empty, the day after one of the meals, and wondered about what it would be like full of guests, eating and talking, ‘reflecting on possible scenarios for social change’. You were sure that it would […]
You had been walking for over an hour along the road beside the railroad track. In a few minutes, you were to find yourself in the plush café and bookstore of the Benaki Museum – Pireos Street Annexe. But at this precise moment you were looking into her eyes. Only now do you realize that […]
Did you take this map with you when you left the cats and went to visit the Acropolis? Were you tempted to draw these diagrams in the dirt alongside the ordered remains of the ancient temple? Did you perhaps glance across from the Parthenon and its stolen marbles to the Erechtheion, lamenting the missing sister […]
When you made the video from which this still is taken, did you consider pausing at the word ‘DO’? As the next word of David Harding’s work at Rizari Park, taken from a Samuel Beckett poem, was ‘NOT’, could you have played Socrates, stopping in his tracks as he listened to his daimonion? Then through […]
You often found yourself in the little library at the Odeion, idly browsing. You saw this cryptic wall-text (amid the sea of floor-text) besides one of Pope L.’s whispers, and took this photograph meaning to decipher it later. You had no idea it was part of Roee Rosen’s The Death of Cattelan, which had been […]
What did you make of Lala Rukh’s beats, her ‘indexing sonic ruptures and melodic sequences as a graphic sensibility? (As Natasha Ginwala puts it in the documenta 14 Daybook). Maybe you encountered them alone or with others, taking them in separately or together, like some kind of chorus, either way, when you left the space of […]
You had forgotten, only remembering later, being told that the installation by the nomadic collective Ciudad Abierta (Open City), with its texts, images, numbered lists and diagrams, would be something that you’d like. You had also forgotten that you were told that, as a Classicist, you would be better placed to understand this work, since […]
I finished my good friend and fellow Classicist Johanna Hanink’s brilliant new book The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in the Era of Austerity before boarding the plane from Madrid to Athens. I am here to experience, research and write about the documenta 14 exhibition, specifically how both ancient sites and themes are activated by the […]