ANTAGONISTIC MOVEMENT [FINGER]PRINTS | ATHENS 2019

About This Project

Series of 20 photographs printed on photo paper and in 20X25 cm. size. They were selected from a larger individual collection on the occasion of the annual festival of the Autonomous Organized Canteen of the Athens Law School, and were exhibited at the 1st Festival of the Canteen at the Athens Law School in May 2019. Some of these photographs are covers of the Libertarian Culture publications books. The shots were made with the Leica D-Lux 4 compact camera.

Keywords & terms: competitive movement, autonomy, autonomous-organization, protest, snapshots, recording, aesthetics & politics.

During some of my journeys to Italy (Milan, Pisa, Venice) and Germany (Berlin, Hamburg), from 2009-13, and through my participation in conferences and/or autonomous movement events, I photographed some points that capture the local competitive movement action: the Spazio Antagonista Newroz social centre in Pisa (2009), during our visit to the international anarchist conference there; the autonomous organized Global Beach campsite in Venice, in Lido, set up for 2 weeks, as a protest against precarious working conditions at the Venice Biennale, with cultural events and speeches by autonomy theorists such as Tony Negri and Mickael Hardt (2009); the pan-Italian remembrance march for the murdered by fascists companion DAX, with the many parallel events (speeches, debates, concerts, etc.) organized by the social competition movement in Milan in 2013; scattered prints of political protest, movement posters: against the monopoly of state and cop violence; against racism; for the conservation of both local cultural and social centres and alternative dwellings; but also against the explosion of rents in Berlin; for Oaxaca; for the persecuted members of the Revolutionary German organization RZ, Sonja and Christian, exiled from the French and German borders; from the Rote Flora occupation, and the San Pauli district in Hamburg in 2012. In this exhibition we present a few of these snapshots, indicatively. In some of these shots there is also shown solidarity in our own movement’s action against the economic (and not only) crisis, in Greece. These shots were made more through a look of fact-recording momentarily, and are less an attempt at artistic imprinting, because the eye never forgets the art of aesthetic photography.