Magic City

Magic City is a multidisciplinary installation that involves video projection, a series of linocut
prints and a series of hand-painted signs.

Magic City is an attempt to remember and rethink the urban landscape of the city of Athens
and pose questions regarding the socio-economical challenges that the city’s working class
had to endure during the turbulent decades of the 50’s and 60’s. The historical context of
the work (50’s and 60’s) is a period of extreme poverty, social injustice, and outright censorship of freedom of speech by a right-wing and philo-monarch government and a far-
right military para-state. Athens is a city struggling to overcome the trauma and the deep societal divisions that the civil war has left behind and this is obvious in the contradictions
within the city’s landscape. Through this work I am exploring the romanticism of the working class and its habits, its neighbourhoods’ gentrification and the rise and fall of local
industries that sustained it.
In Magic City I am reappropriating the traditional, working class, male dance of zeimpekiko,
and the lettering and graphic design tradition in the industries of the time in order to convey
a feeling of nostalgia; in times of social and political struggle a city and its people live, work,
dance and dream on.