Future Past Due: A Re(-)collection of Unthinkable Histories from Memoranda-era Greece

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the political aesthetics of historical redress in Athens, Greece, through a combination of speculative, ethnographic, and archival case studies involving the defacement and ruination of contested public monuments and monumental national infrastructures. Building on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Athens between 2016 and 2019, each featured case study is differentially informed by a focus on (what) remains of and at Ellinikon International Airport, a haunted decommissioned airport-turned-temporary-refugee camp in Greater Athens and the largest public asset of the national privatization program mandated by Greece’s international creditors in exchange for the country’s continued economic bailout. Three case studies constellate this dissertation’s overarching preoccupation with how emergent relations between monumentality, ruination, futurity, and defacement are informing shifting sensibilities and practices of historical redress and national belonging in austerity-era Greece: 1) a makeshift civil aviation museum located inside the abandoned airport’s illegally occupied Arrivals Terminal; 2) the juxtaposition of contemporary plans for Ellinikon’s commercial redevelopment with an unrealized mid-century utopian modernization plan calling for the airport’s relocation to Makronissos, a notorious postwar island internment camp for Leftists dissidents; and 3) a consideration of defacement as a modality of historical redress, staged as a speculative crime scene investigation into the whereabouts of the fugitive statue of Harry S. Truman in Athens. Along these lines this dissertation experimentally intervenes in an established body of anthropological literature on austerity in Greece by focusing on the ways in which the past may be alternatively reactivated and re-mediated under contracting political and socio-economic horizons. What is at stake in each case study under consideration is the reclamation of speculation as a futural orientation to the past capable of critically (re)presenting the haunting afterlives of ruined – and ruinous – sensibilities of national take-off and modern European arrival. Likewise, enacting a perspectival shift in the terms of anthropological engagement, an anchoring focus on national historiographical objects (e.g., monuments and infrastructure) gives way throughout this dissertation to a style of history-telling/showing that conspires speculatively with its subject matter – and in some cases informants – to constellate alternative senses of historical redress, political affiliation, and cultural critique.