WeakMonuments_builtEvent 7

aristide antonas, alexios dallas, filippos oreopoulos

Urban Essay - Collection of finds / towards an impossible representation of the city through some of its criminal acts

Weak Monuments is a show prepared by the Built Event group with the ambition to describe a city out of some crimes that took place in its public space.Thessaloniki is a city marked by famous murders; it is also an ordinary modern town where a lot of "insignificant" criminal acts take place. The aim of this Built Event's show is to pose the question of murder in an urban level. A particular way of "forgetting" structures the modern city fabric; a modern city functions with an immoral determination to forget its crimes. “Forgetting” can be described as a complex urban strategy: it functions with classifications, stratifications, rationalizations and archive elaborations. The strategies treating the traumatic events of the city could be shown as constitutive elements for the urban fabric.

The term "κτιστό συμβάν" (ktisto symban = "built event") was first introduced in this group works in order to describe a particular field of works, that could not be described as a procedure and neither as the procedure's traces: a built procedure (a theatrical preparation), a work of tracing, and some random resultant traces were considered as equally important parts of the same theatrical approach to "places" and "facts". A workshop and the workshop’s results, are the core of the work. An open archive is created. The show is only an extraction of this archive, proposed in a particular place: this time it will be the Bar Association of Thessaloniki.

WeakMonuments_BuiltEvent7 challenges the idea of murder (the event par excellence) as an archived function: archiving the murderous city events is considered here as an urban constructive strategy: a city is shaped as a particular reception of its murders. Placing and recording mark the city’s repetitive rhythm. A city is usually conceived as a platform for events; WeakMonuments_BuiltEvent 7 inverts this description: what if the city was the receptacle that is programmed to receive first and foremost those events? What kind of distortion would we get if we undertake such an inversion particularly in Thessaloniki, a city of so many modern famous murders?  

continue >