Syntagma 20 October 2011
VIDEO, 2011
A short film shot on a mobile phone during the anti-austerity protests that took place in Athens on October 20, 2011.
The footage was recorded without a specific intention, partly as a reaction to my daily and often exhaustive practice of photographing demonstrations, riots and public gatherings across the city. At the time, the continuous documentation of events unfolding in Athens had become a routine.
Edited later that same night, the film was conceived with no particular ambition beyond recounting a simple journey: the walk from my home in Exarcheia to the violent demonstration in Syntagma Square. Following this route through the city, the film traces a passage from the ordinary rhythms of everyday life into a moment of collective confrontation and historical rupture.
Assembled from fragments recorded along the way, the film functions less as a document of the events themselves than as a personal trajectory through a city undergoing profound political and social upheaval.
Uploaded during the night of October 20, the film circulated widely online the following morning and was featured by numerous news websites, blogs and social media accounts, reaching audiences well beyond the immediate context in which it was made.