Athens Subsumption traces the commodification and financialization of our daily life by bringing the universal and particular into relation. We are building a generative, socially integrated practice to observe and respond to new geographies emerging locally from the backdrop of globalization. Where space is transformed into a point of exchange, we devise research methodologies to uncover the forgotten and invisible, in ways that are both playful and revealing. The Athens Subsumption collective uses analogue and digital means to dissect concepts through a variety of theoretical tools and methodologies. Areas of inquiry within the current trajectory of our work are intentionality, queering the city, tourism and the commons. If one moves beyond the banality, a whole nexus of global trade, labor, human desires, and patterns of consumption evoke the complex relationship between inside and outside; flows and mobilities.
Below you can find a few relics from our past projects.
QUEERING THE CITY
Athens Subsumption introduced collaborative exercises and tools to cruise cities. Together we expanded queer urban potentials and developed rituals to reclaim political, economic and social desires within the cityscape and produce transformative mappings. Guided by José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia we reimagined queerness inscribing the city with the potentiality of another world, where everyone can find a place to be free and happy. Leaving behind traces for others to discover, we reveled in possibilities of performing and forwarding utopic futures of queerness. Reading, walking, passing through, biographing objects we send messages for those who listen and notice. Cruising the Erotic City presented at Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival 2019 and Cruising Athens: Potentialities for Queer Futures presented at Queer Archive Festival, Athens 2020.
STONE READING STAND, Wholy Pigeon, Unlmtd To profit from pilgrims, heavy symbolism and selfies, we offer clients a new and improved ritual to access Tinosian powers of intentionality and a chance to be reborn as spiritual anarchist. Beginning with a guided visioning each individual infuses the stones with the coincidence of their encounter with WPU in Tinos, of all places in the universe. Reclaiming the commons of transcendental powers we provide guidance, inspiration, and meaning by reading stones gathered from the upper, lower, inner and outer parts of Tinos. These stones foretell each clients relation to their unique path as it intermingles with flows of the island.
We assume that there is use value in the area that is latent and we want to bring it to the surface. To reach this goal, we employed a mixed methodology of meetings with the locals and tourists, exploratory and observative drives, and public space interventions. We met with permanent residents diverse in age, gender, ethnicity, income and profession, to collect data about the area’s past and see also what connotations people attribute to this place today. We triggered discussions around several thematics, such as value, ruins, capital, community building, documentation and memory. What economic conditions resulted in the ruinous state of the buildings. How a place is valorized in relation to memory. What is a monument. Is value as a symbol contradictory to value as an experience ? How can residents, temporary or permanent, can be manipulated for the sake of our objectives?
The Island Resignified Lefkada, Greece July 1-15, 2017
With Women’s Work in Revolt! Feminist Struggle and Insurrectionary Memory
WAKE UP NOW Imagine the freedom to live the life of your dreams by starting your own successful art project. That’s the beauty of our model. So many artists have done just that, and have transformed their careers, their lives … themselves. They have created a better work-life balance because they choose when to work and when to play. With the right leadership, tools and effort, you can too. Panel Performance we did for the money and the cultural capital. A meta-workshop in which we compromised our values, reputation, and relationships for approximately 500 euros.
BRING OUT THE DATA
September 15-16, 2015 Hybrid City Conference
Through workshops, urban games, visual ethnography, zines, experimental film, and online collaboration, Athens Subsumption activates different social spheres. We explore the exchange of capital, services, information, and value beyond territories and borders. The emerging socio-geographies of individuals, relationships, and inner emotional landscapes are revealed. Creating laboratories of inquiry, we examine the interconnected lives within a globalized economy and the subsequent opportunities for creating both the tangible and intangible commons.
SLEEPWALKING THE CITY This experimental documentary weaves memories, histories and emotions gathered from a diverse group of Athenians as they walked through their city. Voices of many are embodied in the protagonist who sleepwalks the city. We see and hear the city through the point of view of this character. His sleepwalking observations give a universal perspective on how the past, present, and future of a city is carved out of the individual experiences and personal truths. The fate of an avatar named Andrea/s, a semi-fictitious figure, whose lifetime is related to fundamental elements of the general metropolitan stories of subsumption such as energy, time, sleep, sounds, landscapes, the extended mind, or the public/private bi-polar. Transmediale: Capture All, 2015, Berlin, Germany at Glossary of Subsumption: Enclosed Athens Disclosed. Screening Side Gallery, Jaipur, India, March, 2015. Sleepwalking the City, Athens, 2015
Since assembling in Athens in November of 2014, as part of the Goethe Institute Athens: New Babylon Revisited, Athens Subsumption has presented at Transmediale “Capture All” [2015, Berlin], Athens Digital Arts Festival “Public space_s” [2015, Athens], Hybrid City III “Data to the people”, University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC) [2015, Athens], Athens School of Fine Arts-BBQ ”Performing utopia” [2016, Athens], Communitism, Midterm and Identity Issues [2016 and 2017, Athens], Open Form, Grace [2017, Athens], Documenta 14, ASFA [2017, Athens], The Island Resignified [2017, Lefkada], GameJam, Goethe Institute [2017, Athens], Twixtlab [2018, Athens], Panteion University [2018, Athens], Wholy Spirit unLmtd [2018, Tinos], Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival [2019, Thessaloniki], Queer Archive Festival [2020, Athens]