Urban creativity is an umbrella term for a range of activities within, or in direct relation to, the city. An important characteristic of situated urban creative practices is that they push legal, moral and cultural boundaries by intervening and exploring alternative ways of using, producing, experiencing, and understanding the city.⁠¹

In thinking about urban creativity, Greek street art has undeniably opened new ways of understanding and experiencing the urban fabric of everyday life, considering the economic and sociopolitical circumstances within which they are placed. Street art (of resistance) as Elias (2014) describes it, has the unique ability to fuse aesthetics and politics, offering a new form of situated participation in urban space and fostering the emergence of a prolific culture. Artists, as he argues, use playful and self-reflective sets of semiotic strategies to engage their audience.

In short, street art practitioners and activists claim their right to participate in the visual construction and reproduction of the Greek ‘publicly accessible space’ (Bengtsen, 2018). The visual environment is ever changing, considering the ephemeral and dynamic nature of street art as well as the economic, political and cultural contexts of these situated practices. Thus, it may elucidate many occurring sociopolitical and cultural displacements. Street art is broader in scope than graffiti, and includes a wider array of techniques, and aesthetic and expressive media. To a large extent, it is an intentional spatiotemporally oriented, ephemeral, entertaining (playful), and cross-cultural, but also socioculturally conventionalized, phenomenon.⁠² Relevantly, street art is typically built on the inter-play between two universal and interacting semiotic systems – language and depiction – and is thus a form of polysemiotic communication (Stampoulidis et al., in press).

This photo essay focuses on a specific kind of street art practice in Greece, namely a number of visual interventions in abandoned buildings, and especially the Xenia Hotels Project initiated by the artist Anna Dimitriou, as communication tools for addressing sociopolitical issues in interaction with the spatiotemporal contextual surroundings (Avramidis and Tsilimpounidi, 2017; Chaffee, 1993). In other words, the present enquiry considers social, cultural, and political activist aspects of Greek street art, problematising the relationship between both cultural and creative activities in abandoned urban space.

Anna Dimitriou, an Athens-based activist, street artist, and urban practitioner only recently started painting walls in abandoned buildings and on the streets of Athens using the typical decorative technique of decalcomania, which is a fusion of different materials including paint-filled engravings and prints. As she has argued in a recent interview conducted by Stampoulidis in September 2018:

It is a good thing our city is full of empty walls that anyone can express him/herself on. Greece is like a notice board that anyone could post their ideas on […] All this began a year and a half ago, when we found out that my father is sick. I started looking at old photos of him, you know the pink ‘80s vintage kind, trying to recover him from the summers of my youth. Those lovely Greek summers that just do not exist anymore. Somehow, like all those abandoned buildings […] It felt like my father was a part of this demolished, lost world and I somehow tried to recover them both. I began the Xenia Hotels Project, in order to give them back life. To make a fuss in order for people to remember them.

Xenia Hotels was part of a state programme which aimed to develop tourism throughout Greece from the 1950s to the 1970s as one of the main priorities for the recovery of the Greek economy after World War II. However, in the late 1990s, Xenia Hotels were abandoned. Despite this, for many Greeks they (still) carry a significant emotional load. Although abandoned, they remain architectural masterpieces of the historical past of Greece, built on the most spectacular places around the country.⁠³

Xenia Hotel, Spetses, April 2017

Xenia Hotel, Parnitha, May 2017

Xenia Hotel, Kalabaka, Meteora, May 2017

Xenia Hotel, Andros, June 2017

Xenia Hotel, Sparta, August 2017

Xenia Hotel, Nafplio, April 2018

Anna Dimitriou⁠⁴ strongly believes that Xenia Hotels may be transformed into cultural beehives by hosting cultural activities and other similar services and institutions:

I put a mirror on their faces. I make these forms that I call ghosts. Because they are forms from an old world that no longer exists, since we have demolished it. However, I recreate it. Ghosts of people who passed through these hotels. On the other hand, the angels in the Xenia Hotels are the guards, who potentially take action to rejuvenate. They are modern angels, detached from angel hierarchies and divisions. They do not have sex, as you know. They are angels who protect these buildings until they give back the life they have promised. In most of my frescoes I meet the head of Piero Fornasetti’s muse from those ornamental dishes. The Xenia Hotels Project highlights the problem of cultural heritage management in Greece […] Architecture is a kind of cultural heritage and social memory (Interview by Stampoulidis with Anna Dimitriou, September 2018).