Since August 2022, the square of Exarcheia, the flagship district of resistance and solidarity movements in Athens, has been barricaded with high metal barriers and surveilled by dozens of police officers on a 24-hour basis. The government plans for a new metro station on the square have turned it into an abandoned area, but also reinvented it from scratch. Seven photographers document the unshakeable determination of people to defend the neighborhood’s only square and its trees.

Their work was first presented in January 2024 in a collective exhibition just next to the fenced site.

The people of the 21st century will be remembered as the ones defending public spaces, both material and imaginary:
Where does memory and lived experience settle, when the physical space from which they stem disappears? How can the function of the city be maintained, when its building blocks are being destroyed, when the dreams collectively realized in its emblematic sites are lost?

For every new fence, a new Square will be born. Exarcheia Square is us.

Photos by: Tatiana Bolari, Olivia Dehez, Nikolas Georgiou, Marc Lepson, Marios Lolos, Stefania Mizara, Giorgos Nounesis
Project design: Mata Kastrisiou and Stefania Mizara

This presentation is organized by the Anarchist Review of Books