Category Archives: Anarchism

Anarchism,Art,Performativity,Politics

The Hegelian pitfalls of the Documenta14 criticisms

by Akis Gavriilidis

 

Recently, while in Cyprus, I spoke to a doctoral student who had just returned from Athens, where, as he informed us, he had visited several events taking place there in the framework of the Documenta14 exhibition. Among these, as he said, a performance “in a building close to Omonia square”. After one or two questions, it came out that this performance was actually not part of Documenta, but a sort of a “counter-event” staged as a satire, under the title dokoùmena (ancient Greek for “things believed/ seen as”, a title which obviously parodies the name of the institution)[1]. Our friend apparently mistook it as being part of the official program.

But was this really a mistake? If so, in what sense?

Documenta consists in a series of artistic works shown during a certain period of time Συνέχεια →

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Anarchism,national identity,Refusal,State

Macedonicity as an art of not being governed

by Akis Gavriilidis

Having lived in Thessaloniki around 1990, I personally witnessed the «our-name-is-our-soul» frenzy that emerged out of the blue in that city and its surroundings and became the starting point for the series of tragicomic events we all know. As most people, I was surprised by this eruption of heated interest for history, geopolitics, ethnology, and a number of other disciplines, for which I was totally unprepared. Listening to all these people who, with the nerve and the conviction of a specialist, repeated incessantly a set of newly discovered «scientific truths», I felt uneasy, but also puzzled, because these «truths» concerned a period and a topic I had no deep knowledge about. Instinctively, I felt there was something wrong with these discourses, but was not quite sure what a valid counter-argument would be.

At that time of confusion, when Greek newspapers were sweepingly stormed by a repetitive wave of “experts” providing “evidence” that “the name Macedonia was never used to describe a language and a people before 1944, this use is arbitrary and artificial,” one day, in a small leftist newspaper, Epokhì, an article appeared which contained some Συνέχεια →

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