Death Drives in the City; or, On a Third-Stream Anamnesis

The story at hand is the spread of little street memorials for the dead in the Greek urbanscape during the current socioeconomic crisis. These memorials point to a third-stream anamnesis: memory focused on the historicity of the everyday that the dominant public culture, split between European cosmopolitanism and the Greek archaic, marginalizes. I am interested in the ethnography of the every day that lacks the securities, facilities, and utilities of a homogenizing and synchronizing context. In the agonistic interplay between the macrological and the everyday, time and space are intrinsically disjointed, and this is refracted in language, vision, and the senses. This experimental ethnography attempts to account for some of these effects as they continue to multiply within the present.

Nadia Seremetakis