Acropolis Un/Interrupted: a visual biography

Vasko Démou – supervised by Dr Yannis Hamilakis

On the 4th of September 1904 Sigmund Freud visited the Acropolis of Athens. Atop the so-called ‘Sacred Rock’ he experienced a schizoid moment triggered by his encounter with the real – the authentic – Acropolis, and which, thirty-two years later, he tried to interpret in terms of a self-inflicted oedipal guilt-trip. Yet the Acropolis that he saw, seventy-odd years after the establishment of the modern Greek state, was in fact the result of a massive reconstructive project entailing the removal of all pre- and post-classical structures and material, and the restoration of the Periclean ruins. But the Acropolis has a long and turbulent biography spanning from the Late Neolithic (3000-2800 BCE) to the present, which has been significantly shortened by the aforementioned project for reasons particular to the historical circumstances of Greece at the time (nation-building requiring the establishment of an interrupted-yet-unbroken continuity between ancient and modern Greece).

Driven by a desire to fruitfully combine archaeology with contemporary art practice and with the conviction that it is the duty of the archaeologist to revisit the (distorted) narratives of the past, this paper sets out to tell the complete 5000-year old history of the Acropolis through an allusive visual presentation. Appropriating iconographic and textual material produced by archaeologists, artists, travellers, and visitors, it aspires to narrate not only the Acropolis’ life-history, but also tell the story of the construction of this life-history. In doing so, it inevitably addresses a number of broader issues implicated in this venture, such as authenticity, ownership of the (‘truth’ about the) past, and the ethics and poetics underlying the production of (academic) knowledge.