The first thing I noticed when visiting Athens a few years ago, was the graffiti, visible on every other building, sometimes a few meters high, work of days, maybe even weeks, it’s beyond plain graffiti, and more can described as street art. It made me think of the cultural aspect of it, why does Athens in particular have so much graffiti on it comparing to Munich or Dublin? Athens has been through a lot in the past decades. Economic crisis, political unrest, migration. Maybe graffiti is one way the city processes all of it, and the city walls become a kind of a diary…
“Caught up in the dynamics of the contemporary city, graffiti and street art unfold as a series of dialectical tensions, crisscrossing between legality and illegality, visibility and invisibility, art and action,* ephemerality and elongation.” (Avramidis & Tsilimpounidi, 2016).
* ephemerality: the quality of being short-lived or temporary.
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