Viktor! part ii.: Ghost/Angel, 2025
Performance, spoken word, pentelic marble, honey.
With Cara Manuela Yepez Mayer
Performance, spoken word, pentelic marble, honey.
With Cara Manuela Yepez Mayer
Unravelling the printshirt.
Aside from the ghost of our friend Viktor, there was another specter haunting Athens. Buses of police, mountains of riot shields, the smug, close-shaven faces of police standing on each corner of Exarcheia, waiting to pounce, their eyes like vultures. Military parades from the ferry. Exarcheia’s public square closed off to build a metro stop, a strategic plan to nip a community’s assembly space in the bud. It reeked of Haussmann. Neoliberal housing developments for expats with huge fences bearing sharpened metal teeth across from the site in Exarcheia where the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos is commemorated. The state towers over the neighborhood, its fangs are leeching blood where it can. As recently as December 2024, the Greek state deployed 5,000 police officers, drones, helicopters, water cannons for the annual commemoration of Alexis’ death - December 6th 2008. They arrested 24 protestors. Exarcheia has a long and storied history of police violence, but also of resistance.
No story could be told of a figure of Exarcheia’s streets without discussing military and police violence in this part of Athens. Through the playfulness of Viktor as our angel-saint-muse, we wanted to tell a story that subverted a visitor’s position towards the city. By kneeling down to Viktor’s eyeline, sniffing, sensing, listening to the streets of Exarcheia, we hope to tell a story of what has been suppressed by the onslaught of Airbnb’s, Biennales, and stainless steel natural wine bars. We want to attune our senses of perception to those who really live in Athens –the students, the animals, the workers and migrants that call this city their home, or make it their exiled place of living, who are kept out of sight by the hegemonic power of the myth of antiquity-era, of post-Documenta-era Athens.
The shirt is a collage of meanings. Like magpies, we have collected shiny things, collated twigs of research to sew into our marble-slab design, rusted over, a bit leaky, a bit washed out, like our days in Athens.
There is a map of ancient Athens from the Rijksmuseum, our poem to Victor, sheet music of the Magic Flute from the Library of Congress, dated 1875. Then there are lyrics and glyphs from an album released on Mississippi Records, A. Kostis’ “The Jail’s A Fine School”.
I Became Thin is a song by A. Kostis about mistreatment at the hands of Greek police, it paints a picture of life in prison. A. Kostis is the alias of Constantinos (Kostas) Bezos, one of the most fascinating and unique figures of Greek popular music of the 1930s. Journalist, musician, composer, singer, actor, and cartoonist, he was an early multimedia artist, who during the years 1930-1938 deposited a chameleon-like musical legacy which continues to fascinate to this day. The Kostis recordings reveal an underworld of the macabre and illicit. The use of guitar in these now-classic rebetika songs display a virtuosity of finger-picked unusual tunings at the dawn of rebetika, when the bouzouki was yet to reach its height of popularity.
Limited shirts are still available. Contact via mail. More infos on pricing and profits can be found in the Viktor!-Zine.
Aside from the ghost of our friend Viktor, there was another specter haunting Athens. Buses of police, mountains of riot shields, the smug, close-shaven faces of police standing on each corner of Exarcheia, waiting to pounce, their eyes like vultures. Military parades from the ferry. Exarcheia’s public square closed off to build a metro stop, a strategic plan to nip a community’s assembly space in the bud. It reeked of Haussmann. Neoliberal housing developments for expats with huge fences bearing sharpened metal teeth across from the site in Exarcheia where the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos is commemorated. The state towers over the neighborhood, its fangs are leeching blood where it can. As recently as December 2024, the Greek state deployed 5,000 police officers, drones, helicopters, water cannons for the annual commemoration of Alexis’ death - December 6th 2008. They arrested 24 protestors. Exarcheia has a long and storied history of police violence, but also of resistance.
No story could be told of a figure of Exarcheia’s streets without discussing military and police violence in this part of Athens. Through the playfulness of Viktor as our angel-saint-muse, we wanted to tell a story that subverted a visitor’s position towards the city. By kneeling down to Viktor’s eyeline, sniffing, sensing, listening to the streets of Exarcheia, we hope to tell a story of what has been suppressed by the onslaught of Airbnb’s, Biennales, and stainless steel natural wine bars. We want to attune our senses of perception to those who really live in Athens –the students, the animals, the workers and migrants that call this city their home, or make it their exiled place of living, who are kept out of sight by the hegemonic power of the myth of antiquity-era, of post-Documenta-era Athens.
The shirt is a collage of meanings. Like magpies, we have collected shiny things, collated twigs of research to sew into our marble-slab design, rusted over, a bit leaky, a bit washed out, like our days in Athens.
There is a map of ancient Athens from the Rijksmuseum, our poem to Victor, sheet music of the Magic Flute from the Library of Congress, dated 1875. Then there are lyrics and glyphs from an album released on Mississippi Records, A. Kostis’ “The Jail’s A Fine School”.
I Became Thin is a song by A. Kostis about mistreatment at the hands of Greek police, it paints a picture of life in prison. A. Kostis is the alias of Constantinos (Kostas) Bezos, one of the most fascinating and unique figures of Greek popular music of the 1930s. Journalist, musician, composer, singer, actor, and cartoonist, he was an early multimedia artist, who during the years 1930-1938 deposited a chameleon-like musical legacy which continues to fascinate to this day. The Kostis recordings reveal an underworld of the macabre and illicit. The use of guitar in these now-classic rebetika songs display a virtuosity of finger-picked unusual tunings at the dawn of rebetika, when the bouzouki was yet to reach its height of popularity.
Limited shirts are still available. Contact via mail. More infos on pricing and profits can be found in the Viktor!-Zine.