This lecture draws on an investigation of the material remains of Ellinikon International Airport, an iconic decommissioned airport in Greater Athens. Conceptualizing the airport as a modern ruin, this lecture examines the site as a contested topography of cultural production and historical reckoning in austerity-era Greece. The lecture constellates ethnographic, literary, and archival case studies of the ways domestic cultural producers have remediated the ruination and prospective commercial redevelopment of the airport in their art and activism. The more critical of these site-specific practices engage speculatively with the haunting afterlives of ruined – and ruinous – expectations of national take-off and modern European arrival, thereby unsettling politicians’ and investors’ attempts to brand the site’s redevelopment as the epicenter of a “new Greece.”

Image: Nikolas Stassinopoulos, "Olympic's last 727 being scrapped at a closed Hellinikon" 

Respondent: Elizabeth A. Davis, Department of Anthropology