“You’ll be shocked,” Effy Alexakis tells me, if I travelled to Greece today. “Athens was so quiet; people explained to me petrol was so expensive and there was no reason for them to go into Athens. You’d remember Greece being loud at night, but the chaos of Syntagma and Omonia Squares is not what I remember it as.”
After a short trip last year, the social documentary photographer Effy Alexakis was aghast at the level of grafitti on the walls, buildings and monuments all over the capital city of Athens. She was so taken aback that she ventured back to the capital last month to capture the images in her latest exhibition entitled The Crisis.
Wanting to capture the mood of the new Greece she was in, Effy went armed with her tool of the trade, her third eye – the lens. She set about documenting the atmosphere of Athens, and Greece, through the eyes of a people in pain.
“It’s like they are a defeated people,” Effy tells Neos Kosmos of the graffiti and words and sentiment she saw.
The aura of the people, the feelings that permeate through the air, is of a country in crisis. Although she says people in Greece still live their carefree lifestyle – going to beaches, dinner and cafes – she say the people are despondent and think of their future. There is one thing on every Greeks mind – ‘what about our children?’.
“You couldn’t avoid hearing about the crisis,” she explains, using the example of a six hour bus ride from the Peloponnese to the capital of Athens. She says just behind her two strangers were seated, who struck up a conversation and automatically began talking about the crisis, how it impacted them, how their lives had changed and what about the future of their children.
“People are just talking about it all the time – it’s such a big part of their life now.
“They see no end to it and I think that’s the hard thing about what’s going on there now,” Effy says.
But in times of crisis, she says the Greeks have retained their humour and their laconic ways towards their words. She gives me the example of the T-shirt she saw on the streets of Athens. A bright orange shirt with the words “Angela Merkel thinks I’m at work” – a dig at the German chancellor.
“Greeks still have a beautiful lifestyle, but there’s that underlying feeling of ‘what’s going to happen to our children’,” she says.
Through the slogans she saw scrawled on the streets, Effy says this is a way for Greeks to express their situation – their feelings as a people who, as she describes “wear their heart on their sleeves”.
“It’s their form of expression, it’s their way of telling people how they are feeling and what’s going on. Some statements are political ones; some are poetic opinion pieces.”
In the exhibition, Effy has chosen to let the images speak for themselves. In one image, she has taken an image of a lady beggar in Kolonaki. She was doubled over due to age and health and as the elderly lady begged for money, people went about their business, chatting and drinking coffee – just as though she wasn’t there. Or the increase in flea markets, with Greek citizens desperately selling their wares to make money.
Through the exhibition The Crisis, as part of the Unbound exhibition at Macquarie University Art Gallery in Sydney, the theme used by the photographer is ‘the book’. In that sense, Effy’s work utilises metaphor – her visual ‘book’ is composed of the urban graffiti in Greece’s major urban centres, the responses of the Greek people to their catastrophic socio-economic upheaval.
In the statement published on the exhibition, the photographer states: “The tradition of urban graffiti continues to openly express the fears and concerns of Greeks today, just as it did during the time of Pericles. Walking through present day Athens and Sparta, a narrative of anger, pessimism, frustration, defiance, and potential sources of renewal and hope are expressed across walls, fences, windows and pavements, exposing the emotional turmoil of contemporary Greece – poignantly referred to as ‘The Crisis’.
“Building surfaces have become book pages and even chapters, consuming both cities in a contemporary tale of potentially endless gloom. Authors are many – the politically radical; the unemployed; the growing urban, unskilled underclass; the disenchanted middle class; alienated artists, poets and writers; and frustrated, disillusioned intellectuals. The cities are telling their tales not in bricks, mortar and marble, but upon them. Arguably, Athenians and Spartans are empowering themselves, through the written narrative makeover of their urban centres.”
The photographer closes her exhibition – her book on the crisis and the textual turmoil she saw – with a poignant image of a beach, rocks and the simple word ‘whatever’ graffitied on the natural wonder.
To her, that was the laconic nature of the Greek people – the deep breath they take and answer with the simple word ‘whatever’. It is a narrative that is yet to have an ending.
Unbound will run until 7 September at the Macquarie University Art Gallery, Building E11A. For more information email arts.events@mq.edu.au