Title:
How it possibly feels like

March, 2021

This project is a series of diagrams that reflect on questions around the emotional implications of a published story. The center of the work is the power of published words. Taking the example of journalism, a published news story holds the position of representing someone while addressing someone else. In a way, published words stand between us as the mediator.

I consider this process of encountering the mediated reality of the Other as a process of moving, that is not “moving on” or “moving away”, but being moved and, thus, moving and transmitting the state of being moved. It is an indication of pathos, or the transferring of pathos, that finds its way through empathy or sympathy towards sensibilization. But above all, it is an indication for our participation in the “world’s becoming.”

In the contemporary view of the society, we are social bodies, interdependent and entangled with other bodies. Our emotions (moving) emanate from this power relationship of interdependence. While the intimacy of our emotions is self-referential and social-referential. In the center of them stands the atomisation, imposed by capitalistic relationships. Our identity becomes a subject of construction or definition every time we meet a published story. Our position as social bodies gets challenged by our position as audience. What matters and what is meaning-full lay in the trembling surfaces of their representation, distribution, and reception. How do we feel when we face our given identity in the published words?

Title:
Circulation of meanings//The Golden Dawn Trial

November, 2020

My case study is a deeply sensitive, socio-political event in the context of my home country and thus familiar to me. It initiated on 17 September 2013 in Greece, with the murder of an individual, during the night in the streets of Athens. I was in my home when the event happened and as the story was unveiling over the following 7 years. Due to personal interest, I was following the news (in social media, blogs, and television news) and I had already formed my own, biased, opinion when the legal case to bring the culprits to justice concluded in September 2020. Based on the trial verdict that was announced in October 2020 (in a heavily guarded court, with tens of thousands of people roaring outside the complex), it is now believed that this story has a great symbolic significance, not only for Greece, but also for the European history of justice and social responsibility. It is now clear that the particularity of the case was forced to orbit around possibilities to reach an abstract generalization of what happened. An event was unfolding around me, like banks of a river expanding as though in flood, redefining dimensions of its historic court ruling. This expansion of import implied the scale of national exceptionalism and political exemplification of this case over other concurrent happenings. It is quite impossible not to wonder how this event came to be a carrier of such meaning and symbolism within the ongoing outbreak of socio-political issues that plague the contemporary society of Europe. As far as I am a member of this multifaceted Greek and European society, the ecology of this story is coherent and ambiguous at the same time. There is a peremptory opacity to my perspective, indicating that the story is what it is, with possibilities to be more, while there is no conclusive reason whatsoever for it being what it is. It is quite absurd. The meaningful truth is derived from incidental events, while it is this exact haphazardness of subsequent events that updates individual opinions in the present and constitutes the course of humanity’s past and future.

Certain theoretical interests led me to ponder on how journalists from the USA spoke about the case in their articles. Among the many, it was Helena Smith, a Guardian correspondent in Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, who drew my attention. She first wrote about the far-right political party, called “Golden Dawn”, and their criminal activity in 2012.15 Many articles followed until 2013, when she reported intensively on their involvement in the individual’s murder mentioned above. Looking back from the enlightening position of the late 2020—wherein all the facts and associations of this event are now publicly available—I continue with three different articles from Helena Smith, dating from 2014, 2015, and 2020.

My quest now concerned how her story was built up through time and how her particular understanding of the facts was translated into commentary and meanings, so as to respond to the question of what is possibly going on. All while evidence, and the consequences of what they prove as facts, were gradually accumulating. I investigated the textual structure, phrases, and words used. Through the identification of patterns within the Figure 1 The titles of the three articles as they were pulished on the Observer, by The Guardian, and as they were processed for the case study. structure of the three texts, I was able to distinguish certain meanings—at least by my subjective cognition. These meanings are associated with Greek society and culture, the position of Europe and the European counteractions, and reflect upon the social classification and human rights values, attaining an importance on a global level. Without a doubt, this specific association and attribution of meanings to this case were rendered through the lens of this medium and the journalist. The impartial position and lack of utilitarianism were presumed. Yet and beyond, this meaning-full act of reporting created a condition of care. While the impact on the bigger race to form default meanings in the course of history is still beyond my reach.

This video was made at three different times:

_The script was written during the first period of quarantine (March 2020), when by distancing myself from my real home (Greece) and by lack of real engagement to events happening there, I got infected by isolation. It is a description of me myself from a distance, in a past time.

_The shooting happened later on, as an attempt to dive into the past. This is why I prefer to refer to it as the making of a home movie.

_The composition and editing came last, right after the start of the final resolution of the main political and social case study from my home (Golden Dawn trial) that I was examining, still in distance. In this part, the main attempt was to create new meanings from the original ones.

I consider these three parts together as an example of connecting the internal reality to the external one. On this point, it is also important the impact of the passing of time on events and meanings.