The Reluctant Metropolis, 2007
Digital Print, 240×20cm
The small town found inspiration for its emancipation in the ideal of Ancient Athens. Its city centre is a provincial pastiche of the classical architecture evoking a sense of homage to the ideals of Classical Hellenism noted for its multiculturalism and philoxenia as opposed to xenophobia. Yet, unwittingly and parallel, this same town, also pays also homage to subversive Colonial ideology with its aim to provide a pretext of western cultural superiority, by nature, exclusive and supremacist. Herein lies the contradiction.
So it is illogical yet not surprising that when the small town became indeed a metropolitan centre, a multicultural magnet, the locals feel discomfort and confusion. The pseudo classical facades stand insular and aloof as the roaming foreigners float every Sunday nearby setting their own market, shops and restaurants with carrier bags, plastic chairs and Styrofoam cups, powerless, invisible and transitory, detached from the small metropolis, just as the architecture feels ephemeral and fake.
NeMe Main