The idol of this age is community. As compensation for the hardness and staleness of our life, this idea has compressed all sweetness into mawkishness, tenderness into weakness, and flexibility into the loss of dignity. Molded by this idea, what is repressed pushes the phantom of an overstrained heart under a gruesome cruelness. An immeasurable chilling of human relationships by mechanical, commercial, and political abstractions conditions an immeasurable reaction in the ideal of a shimmering community overflowing through all of its supporters.   

Helmuth Plessner, The limits of community: A critique of social radicalism, 1924.

In the recent years, Greek society is experiencing a revival of collectivities, collective forms of protest, self-organization and participatory initiatives. Especially in the past one and a half years one observes an intense collectivization of life. Interpretations of its causes abound: the growing deficit of representation, the need to undo quotidian misery, the waning of embedded spaces of socialization, the loss of working space, the growing irrelevance of entertainment, the Dionysian seduction of the collective protest, the fascination with “autogestion”, the indulgence of a micro-utopian radicalism, the ritualistic anathema upon the political history of metapolitefsi, the demise of parliamentarism, the proliferation of “alternative lifestyles” with an orientalist flair, the trend of anticonsumerist vacations, the weaponization of online social networks, the “exit” towards an idealized rural life.      

Artists: Filopappou Group, Yiannis Theodoropoulos, Vassilia Stylianidou, Vassilis Vlastaras, Maria Glyka, Yiannis Grigoriadis, Yiannis Isidorou, Yorgos Gyparakis, Despina Meimaroglou, Mary Zygouri, Maria Paschalidou, Anna Lascari, Dimitris Dokatzis, Poka Yio, Yiannis Skaltsas, Yiannis Sinioroglou, Tassos Papatsoris, De-Regulators (Panos Kompatsiaris / Hypatia Vourloumis / Marios Chatziprodromiou / Mary Zygouri).